


Finu a morte caperemu

by ozarkhowler



Series: Aegis [3]
Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Multi, World War I, will add more tags and characters as they appear
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-26
Updated: 2018-09-02
Packaged: 2018-09-27 00:41:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 16
Words: 50,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9942260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ozarkhowler/pseuds/ozarkhowler
Summary: "You'll live forever if the good die young."European theater, World War I. Some thrived, some didn't, and some left their wounds to putrefy.Original characters are used.





	1. Lapse

Lovino Vargas was on the first ship to America. It was some point in the 1860s and he didn’t want to think hard enough about what had happened to warrant remembering the exact date.

They stopped twice on the way to New York: once in Ireland, once in Cuba. Both times Lovino was not prepared for the weather and both times his legs buckled underneath him upon getting onto dry land.

Lovino was one of the blessed few to not have issues with seasickness. Lovino was also one of the few to be (debatably) a medic.

“Chew on this.”

“Press this knuckle between your fingers.”

“Lie down.”

All of them had heard the rumors and therefore knew better than to question him, the young man with hazel eyes older than the ocean below them.

The Statue of Liberty didn’t break the horizon when Lovino arrived; his strongest memory of them docking was the fin-grey water below them and how much the cresting waves looked like tombstones.

He still remembered what he now knew was called “Castle Gardens”. He tried to express that he had no papers; his English at this point left something to be desired. A hand grabbed him by the bicep and he turned, looking into blue American eyes that reminded him of gun barrels.

“You’re with me, Guido.”

~~

The year was 1894. Francis Bonnefoy was writing a letter in his office when a military man came knocking on his door.

“There’s a mole.”

Francis looked up.

“Excuse me?”

“Someone within the higher command is leaking information to the Germans, and we think we’ve found out who it is. One of our captains. We found this in his wastebasket.”

Francis smoothed the stub out with long, practiced fingers. _Alfred Dreyfus._

“A _Jew,_ sir.”

Francis took a deep breath through his nose before giving the evidence back to the man in uniform.

“Please bring him in for questioning.”

A few months later during his trial he realized the man was almost definitely innocent. When Dreyfus tried to plead with Francis before they broke his sword he remained silent.

To question court orders, no matter how erroneous, was to question the state. And everyone knew that the state could do no wrong.

~~

Feliciano was still licking wounds from his failed attempt at a campaign in Ethiopia when his phone rang.

“Hello, this is Feliciano Vargas speaking.”

“The king is dead.”

“What?”

“Umberto has been assassinated. We need both of you immediately.”

“You can only have me, my brother is—“

_Click._

“My brother won’t be back for another two weeks,” Feliciano said into empty air.

_Forty years and only now he wants to come back._

Feliciano, with the phone still against his ear, dialed a different number for someone perhaps even more qualified than his older brother if they went by age. Why wasn’t he representing more often, anyhow? It was _his_ monarchy.

“Hi, how fast can you get here? I’ll pay for your ferry but please, as soon as possible—“

~~

Francis always sat with a leg delicately crossed over his knee, his limbs always stacked on top of themselves like a delicate nest of toothpicks.

“Arthur, I think we should stay together.”

Arthur’s heavy eyebrows immediately curved upwards.

“Diplomatically,” Francis added, causing Arthur to exhale loudly from his nose.

“What do you have in mind?”

“An alliance, an _entente,_ ” he replied, smiling to himself at Arthur’s flinching at his native language. “What do you say?”

“What else can I say besides I agree?”

~~

When Wilhelm was crowned Gilbert got a deep, foundational feeling that it would be the last time they would have a king. It made him begin to question if he would be around to see what would take Wilhelm's place. 

Wilhelm II would also make him question why he ever bothered dealing with the monarchy in the first place.

None of this seemed to be going through Gilbert’s head when he threw himself on top of the man whose gun was pointed directly at Wilhelm.

~~

_Lovino,_

_Oh, my goodness, have you been reading any of this new literature? I’m almost not angry that he left for Switzerland to escape military service, if it means he became such a brilliant writer! I’m sending this letter with his novel and some of his articles from the newspaper. I think you’ll like them. I know you’re not into socialism and you don’t like to get too involved in politics after…after everything, but I do think you’ll enjoy this. Please give his work a chance. Promise?_

_Love, as always,_

_Feliciano_

Lovino folded up the letter and opened the book, _The Cardinal’s Mistress,_ for about ten pages before sucking his teeth and throwing that damn dishrag of a novel into the goddamn fireplace. He paced around his living room and moved to sit down, moving one of his cats from his chair, before writing the following:

_Feli,_

_Be careful about men like these. They always end up changing their mind when too many people listen to them. Charity’s the hallmark of the poor, you know what I mean? I guarantee he will change his tune once he gets more money and more attention._

_Be safe and be sensible,_

_Lovino_

Lovino, with aching bones and a heavy mind, looked out his window and didn’t know if it was good to be back in the end.

His house felt awfully large.

~~

“I’m not yours,” were the words that fell from the Bulgarian’s lips while the Turk’s eyebrows shot into his scalp.

“Oh? Says who?”

He produced a slip of paper, upon which was transcribed a declaration of independence.

“I say, that’s who.”

Sadik snorted, pushing his hands back under the table to hide the fact that they were trembling.

“Nikola. This means only that what I give it.”

“Do you really think I don’t know you won’t do otherwise, old man?”

~~

Roderich was not like the other Germans, who would straighten up and broaden when threatened, bark and growl. Roderich had a curious habit of hunching into himself, curled like a snail’s shell, and hissing, steaming like an overdone kettle. He was in that position over his desk when Erzsebet found him, peering around the doorframe to listen to him wheezing to himself in German. He was translating a letter from Serbian into his native tongue, parsing out the dissent word by word.

“That vile, ugly, _brute_ —“

Erzsebet turned around immediately to leave him to his own devices.

~~

Six people were awoken from slumber, from daydreams, from dissociative episodes by the unmistakable sound of a gunshot. None of them could tell if it was a real sound outside or a sudden interjection from their subconscious.

The telegrams sent to them proved a middle ground.

“Archduke Franz Ferdinand has been assassinated.”

~~

The Serb sat in front of Ivan Braginsky with a face that said nothing and a body posture that said he was afraid. Ivan’s desk was full of maps, broken pens, and half-empty glasses of chamomile tea and liquor; the air around him was stained with the smell of sweat and ice.

This was an excellent example of how the wolf turns to a rabbit in front of a bear.

“Well. After _all_ I have done to keep peace—“

“I did what I had to do.”

“Boro,” Ivan began, pushing slightly back from his desk. “Let me finish. Your people didn’t even do it.”

Boro tugged at a lock of his too-short blond hair before making eye contact with Ivan again.

“As I was saying, you Serbs weren’t even capable of pulling the trigger It was a Bosnian—“

“Bosnia is ours. Bosnia is mine.”

“She would say otherwise.”

“She’s been brainwashed—“

Ivan sighed before his hand jerked to grab one of the half-empty glasses on the table and take a hard gulp of what was either chamomile tea or vodka.

“That’s besides the point. Austria sent you an ultimatum, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Then it means war. Boro, you are _very_ lucky.”

Boro flinched as Ivan flicked open a pen.

“How, sir?”

“As you know, Roderich hates us Slavs. But you see…there is only one thing in the world he hates more than Slavs, and that’s getting his hands dirty,” he chuckled, pleased with himself at his own marvelous sense of humor. Boro laughed more out of obligation than agreement.

Ivan began to write a letter.

“You are lucky that I am so fond of you, Boro.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Get out of my sight.”

~~

Roderich sat in a chair while pressing his face into his hands. His coat had a hole in the shoulder that he had been meaning to patch and his eyes were punctuated with dark circles. Erzsebet could see from where she was sitting that he was shaking.

“Erzsi.”

“Yes?”

“There’s no other option.”

“No.”

“Erzsi, please call Gilbert. I’m not in a position to speak with him at the moment.”

Gilbert, of course, found all of this far more entertaining than either Erzsebet or Roderich did. Her hands tightened around the phone cord and her teeth began to bite through a canker sore while listening to his voice, probably sour with beer and self-contentment. Erzsi wondered for a moment if Gilbert still had that faint scent of dried blood and gunpowder on his collar.

“Ludwig will have to be involved. You realize that, right?”

“Yeah, of course, but it’s not going to last long. What’s a few Russkies? It will be over within the year, we will go home, have a laugh, and toast to how fast he’s grown and how much faster he’ll become a world power to be reckoned with.”

Erzsebet could only take a deep breath.

“He’s going to do amazing things, Erzsi. Better than all of us. He’s going to be _good._ I can’t wait to see _how_ good. Watch in the next ten years. It’ll be incredible.”

“He’s young enough to not know anything about good or bad, and that’s what worries me.”

Gilbert cleared his throat in a way that reminded her of how much older he actually was.

“He’s young enough to _know better_ than to make our mistakes. Anyway, I side with both of you. So does he. If you’re going to war, we are as well, and we’re prepared to do whatever is necessary.”

~~

_Telegram to Arthur Kirkland from Francis Bonnefoy:_

**REMEMBER OUR LITTLE AGREEMENT STOP I THINK NOW IS TIME TO ACT UPON IT STOP PLEASE MEET WITH ME AT ONCE REGARDING STRATEGY STOP I WILL MAKE IT WORTH YOUR WHILE STOP NOT IN THAT WAY WILL YOU DESIST IN MAKING THAT FACE STOP**

Arthur was definitely making that face while telegramming each and every last colony he still possessed:

**COME TO LONDON AT ONCE STOP THE CROWN AND ALL THINGS JUST ARE IN PERIL STOP**

Not an hour passed before he began receiving telegrams such as these:

**ON THE NEXT BOAT OUT**

**YES**

**OF COURSE**

And then, finally, one from the Orient:

**CAN’T BE BOTHERED SO I ROLLED A CIGARETTE WITH YOUR TELEGRAM STOP HOPE YOU DON’T MIND OLD MAN STOP**

The reader should know that the responder at this point was no more than twelve years old and had already chewed through several of Arthur’s nerves.

“Cheeky.”

~~

Several Italian men sat at a table strewn with documents that cannot be disclosed in a public record such as this.

“Well, we’re flanked by the Austrians and we have the Royal Navy parked a stone’s throw away. What’s going to be the policy?”

Feliciano stared down at the table before drawing a large, decisive circle around a few figures.

“We’re going to remain neutral until we see what each side has to offer us.”

He took a deep breath.

“ _However_ , for now we will stay cozy with the Alliance. I and another will go casually meet with the Germans.”

Lovino was still cradling a stale cigarette when Feliciano finally looked up to him.

“And you…better freshen up on your suture skills. Just in case.”

Lovino’s mouth pushed into a wry smile.

“Yes.”

 


	2. Mobility

Lovino came into his empty house for the first time in so long and allow himself to breathe in several decades of dust.

“And you’re sure you’ll be fine down here?”

Lovino wouldn’t look at Feliciano and Feliciano was convinced he’d said something wrong.

“Yes, let me just…for a bit, okay? I’ll come up in a few weeks’ time. But for now I need to….”

Feliciano’s lips were thin even before they had pressed together in a concerned line.

“Will I ever talk to you normally again?”

“Feli, it’s not like that—“

“No, you’re right, it’s not like that. Tell me more about how much _you_ know about losing people. Inform me, by all means, what it’s like to lose someone. Because _surely_ I don’t know _anything_ about what that feels like!”

“Feli—“

“No, never enough to fucking _leave everything_ to go to a different country for _forty years_ because I feel like my duty to one person supersedes my _obligation_ to my _entire country_ , so I’m going to take a forty year break on doing my _job!_ ”

Lovino’s full mouth bent into an angry M before pushing out his two cents a burst of seven words:

“Feli, _you don’t do your job either.”_

“At least _I_ have the decency to stay on the _fucking continent_ when I decide to slack off.”

“What, you want me to go back? Is it better for me to leave so you don’t have to watch me be at least a little sad and have that inconvenience you?”

“I don’t want you to leave, I want you to be my brother!”

Lovino’s face almost immediately lost its hardness while he took a look at his younger sibling for the first time in what felt like over a century. Feli, with almond-shaped light eyes and a chronic sunburn painted across his upturned nose and nonexistent cheekbones, made almost entirely of circles, and gaining the slightest paunch over staying indoors with painting and paperwork instead of terrorizing the shipyards like God intended for him.

“Lovino, let me stay.”

“Here? I’m just cleaning for a few weeks.”

“I know.”

_Lovino, please don’t leave me alone anymore._

~~

Francis could never abide by London and he was sure that Arthur and the others knew this, because whenever there was a reason for them to go he would inevitably come down with a slight cold. Never enough to warrant not going, but always enough to be an inconvenience.

“We are here for _negotiations_ in regards to the _war effort._ You are expected—“ he sniffed, “—to be back at this building tomorrow morning at ten o’clock. We will speak on strategy.”

Most of the people in this room had a limited grasp of French so far. Francis did not particularly care.

He made eye contact with one of his oldest territories: a dark-haired young man who was definitely planning something after this meeting and it certainly wasn’t a game of backgammon.

“I expect you to be decent.”

“ _Oui,_ _monsieur._ ” And with a wink and a flash of tobacco filling Francis’s stuffed nostrils, his formerly Genoese servant was out the door, calling for Arthur, you ugly son of a bitch, who do I have to kill to get a drink around here?

~~

London was never the place to be to meet pretty people and when Georgia walked into the pub with her four female friends it was obvious that some of them had been starved for company for a long time. But as they took her in, all five feet ten inches of her and her red hair, they started to look back to their drinks. Nobody wanted an Amazon.

“Nell, this was a bad idea,” she huffed before sitting down in a booth far off from the bar itself.

“Nah, just the right one. We’ll get you out of your slump, little miss.”

 _Not so little_ , Georgia mused while shifting a large leg out from the booth to accommodate the others.

“What about him?”

“What?”

“Tall, dark and handsome over there. Go talk to him.”

Georgia squinted at the man hollowing his shoulders around a half-finished cigarette.

“Him? With the ponytail?”

“Yes, in the leather overcoat.”

“ _Handsome._ How would you know, ah? You can’t even see his face.”

“I don’t need to see a face to know a good body under a big coat,” chided Nell. “Go talk to him. Get him to buy you a drink.”

“What if he doesn’t?”

“Then _I_ buy you a drink, you finish it, and then ask another guy to buy you a drink. After four drinks, someone will buy you a fifth. I can say with some certainty it wouldn’t be me. Now go on. He looks like he _bites._ ”

The other girls burst into knowing laughter and Georgia rolled her eyes before finally leaving their company.

He _wasn’t_ bad looking, Georgia had to admit it; he had a nice pair of shoulders and what looked like a strong jaw ducked into his collar while he addressed the person next to him. She noticed three gold rings in his ear and pigeonholed him immediately as a sailor.

“Hey. You.”

The sailor looked up and she faltered. Nell had been a little _too_ right about “handsome”. He couldn’t have been much older than twenty-six, with evenly dark skin that darkened a little further on his cheekbones. He had an expression she would not hesitate to call _naughty._ She grabbed the cigarette out of his rough fingers and took a drag.

“Buy me a drink.”

“What makes ye think I have _money_?” he retorted in a thick sailor’s tongue, leaning forward to pluck his cigarette back out of her mouth. The man next to him was going pink from a few too many but was just sober enough to give Georgia’s target a little buff on the shoulder. _A redhead. Don’t do what I think you’re about to do._

Georgia tried to think of what a _heroine_ would say in a situation like this.

“A drink is only a few pence, but my company will last you a lifetime.”

He smiled radiantly and his friend’s face began to sour.

“Andria, leave her alone.”

Andria briefly looked back and Georgia would have guessed he almost looked…apologetic. But it didn’t last long.

“Is that a threat or a promise coming from you?”

“I’m still figuring that out. Buy me a drink and we’ll see.”

Andria’s shoulders flexed into a shrug and he pawed for his pocketbook.

“Fine, then. What will the lady have?”

“Get me a red.”

“Yes, ma’am. And what brought you to this little corner of the world, my love?”

“A slump and a few friends who really should know better.”

He shifted to take off his coat, casually draping it on the rung of his stool. Through the thin weave of the cloth of his shirt she could make out…were those tattoos?

 _Pick the one ruffian in the whole room, why don’t you,_ she thought as she looked back at Nell. Nell was definitely enjoying herself a little _too_ much.

“Should we go rescue her?” asked Mamie.

“Nah, she’s fine. She can handle herself,” said Nell before taking another sip of her drink. Georgia had already milked him for two glasses of wine and they were sitting closer and closer to each other. “She’s going to be _just dandy._ ”

Two more glasses of wine later and she was definitely not the same girl who had walked in before.

“ _Andria._ Will you walk me to the restroom? ‘Fraid I might trip.”

He was feeling his beer a little harder than before; the main difference between them was that he’d had years of practice walking straight in such a state.

“Yes, miss.”

She grabbed his hand and Arthur grabbed his other, causing Andria to lurch back. Arthur’s mouth positioned itself to spit a message: _It won’t bring her back._

Arthur could see the words pass through Andria’s brain, settling behind his eyes before his lips twisted into something that wanted to be a smile.

“Ah, fuck off. Just give me a few, yeah? It’s been awhile. You can take care of yourself till then.”

“Of course I can. I’m an _empire._ ”

“So was I, remember?”

“I’m _still_ an empire.”

“ _Fuck you—“_

Georgia was tugging on the other hand and he finally allowed Arthur some peace and quiet, making it across the bar and into the seclusion of the bathroom before finally being pulled down to kiss her.

“Mm.”

“What?”

His mouth caught on her ear before he spoke.

“Don’t like a girl so much shorter than me when it comes to this sort of thing.”

Georgia laughed while Andria’s mouth found the exposed skin at her throat.

“Then get on your knees.”

Her skirt was hiking up and his hands were _threatening_ when he let out a low whistle.

“ _Jee-sus._ ”

The Corsican was not one to refuse when he was being so readily offered something. He did as he was told.

He came back out some twenty minutes later, wiped his mouth, and realized that the entire bar had been splintered into a million pieces while he’d been…occupied.

_Just like old times._

To make it even more nostalgic, Arthur was drunk on the ground.

“We both know what happened, but did you start it?”

There was a bit of a crunching noise as Arthur lifted his head.

“What would I be starting a cataclysmic bar fight over?”

“That’s what I’m asking you.”

“Nah, lad. Someone looked at someone else funny, carried on about it, broke a bottle, let him have it, that sort of shite.”

Andria went to salvage his coat, still hanging on the stool. Judging from how clean the two were, Arthur hadn’t left their spots unguarded.

“Little bit of a disappointment. What happened to you being the terror of the Spanish Main?”

“Haven’t the _energy_ anymore,” Arthur coughed, rolling onto his back. “This is me three revolutions and about fifty-odd children later. And to add to that, don’t you know there’s a war on?”

Andria pulled Arthur up, looping his arm over his broad shoulders. Arthur’s nostrils were hit with the smell of sweat and old leather and it made him a bit nostalgic. Then again, every time he was with the Corsican it made him nostalgic; nostalgia for the Englishman was just a nine-letter word for regret. He’d never asked Andria if he’d been forgiven for what he did just under a hundred and fifty years ago. Some things just weren’t meant to be addressed while drunk.

“Come on, old man.”

“You’re older than me, Andria.”

“Ah, but you see, you’ve curled like milk and I’m still glisteningly young and beautiful,” cooed Andria before hefting Arthur onto his back. “I can’t help that brown doesn’t frown.”

“This is a moot point given that you know I will outlive both you and your grandchildren regardless of how poorly I’ve aged.”

Andria’s long point of a nose tipped back delicately when he considered the point.

“Perhaps.”

The closest thing to a concession you would ever get out of him. Arthur would take it.

The streets were practically deserted and Arthur buried his nose in Andria’s shoulder. _To be young again,_ he mused, as if he wasn’t forever twenty-seven.

“Tell me something.”

“Anything.”

“If you’re the Empire, if the sun never sets on you, if you’re a global power, and I’m carrying you about like I’m about to have you on our wedding night, what does that make me?”

Arthur deliberated silently for about five seconds.

“Makes you a tit. Walk faster.”

Andria’s laugh bounced off of the cobblestones and it made Arthur shiver.

“Yes, _sir._ ”

~~

Francis was staring at a pocket watch while sitting amongst dignitaries and colonies alike.

The slump of Andria’s neck implied a hangover but the rest of his body seemed to alert the entire room that he’d spent the whole night fighting and fucking and didn’t care who knew it or what kind of consequences he’d face later. Francis glanced up at Arthur. Arthur’s eyes met with his just long enough for him to relay two words: _wasn’t me._

A commotion erupted as a burst of Arthur’s colonies entered the room. _Cyprus and Malta._ Andria was seeing Salvatore for the first time since Salvatore was a boy and Malta was clearly not prepared for the near-violent onslaught of noise and color that Corsica brought regardless of where he went or what the circumstance.

“Look at your _beard—_ “

 _It’s good,_ Francis mused. _He needs some familial touches after what happened to his sister._

This still didn’t change the fact that Andria was nearly two meters tall and had all the voice control of a child in an auditorium.

Tunisia and Algeria, whom he had named (respectively) Raoul and Ambroise, were watching and sitting next to each other. Their shoulders were touching and they were smirking in a way that Francis failed to understand. Francis didn’t want to understand them anyway. They just had to understand _Francis._

Francis was always ready to admit to anyone who wasn’t under his control that these meetings were entirely about exerting power, about seeing who would get up from their sweaty corners of the world to come see him and verify how important he still was, but no one was asking so no one heard him say that, yes?

Francis was more ready to fight than Arthur was, which surprised no one. He had to put that aggression somewhere, and Arthur was no longer fair game anymore. At least, in public.

“And you’ve already begun mobilizing, yes?”

“Yes.”

“This will be over like lightning. I’m not worried too much about that projected spending.”

Arthur hadn’t fought a land war in a very long time. He wasn’t about to admit that, though, even though it was perhaps one of several elephants in the war room.

“We have an ally in Russia. I hope that’s not an issue for you, Arthur?”

Arthur sniffed. _Yes, it was—_

“No, not at all.”

_I’ve an ally in Japan, in America, so many allies of the Crown that we’re practically drowning in them—_

“Please ask America for aid in this time.”

“We have Canada sending aid, but Alfred—“

“Matthew works very hard to make up for the _terrible_ truth for you of him not being his brother. Is that what you were going to say?”

Arthur’s palms were sweating and he wanted a cigarette, but if he left the room at this point he’d look weak and indecisive and they couldn’t have that, not now, not in front of all these colonies who had to be reminded of just _who_ he was.

“Nothing of the sort, Francis. Continue.”

~~

Gilbert, Ludwig, Roderich and Erzsebet were sitting at a round table in Vienna. Gil smiled, thin lips showing discolored teeth, and Roderich’s neck got hot under his shirt collar.

“So your empire is disintegrating. No money, no revenue the way there used to be.”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve managed to get yourself in a war with three of the largest armies that Europe has to offer.”

Roderich exhaled before looking out the window, thinking of what all else he would rather be doing than look up Gilbert’s nose.

“Yes.”

“ _Well done._ Really. I mean, why jump into the pyre when you can do a backflip.”

“Gilbert, stop it—“

“Truly, I think there should be some new section of the Aeneid written about Aeneas building Rome and then pulling it down, brick by brick, just so I can get a copy for you and ask if they wrote it with you in mind—“

“ _Gil—“_

“Because no one, in the history of the universe, could call down hell upon himself the way _you_ just have—“

If the bullet with Franz Ferdinand’s death warrant written on the casing was heard ‘round the world, the palm of Erzsebet Hedervary’s hand colliding with the hard bone of Gilbert Bielschmidt’s cheek was a sound that moved every heavenly body about two inches off of orbit.

“It’s done. It doesn’t matter how badly he ruined things. They’re already ruined. We have to salvage what’s left and move forward.”

Roderich squirmed again. _This is somehow less comforting._

“We have to move quickly to kick Francis’s legs out from underneath him. Once he gains traction, it’s over.”

“What about Arthur?”

“Arthur hasn’t had land legs since the 18th century. I’m not worried about _him_ so much as all the colonies he’s going to bring along with him to do his dirty work.”

Roderich perked up at the mention of colonial intrigue.

“Think any of them would be interested in—“

“I was already going to dispatch Lud to talk to the dignitaries from India. And I know a few Balkans outside your control who would be interested in sticking a Serb or five, so that should be at least somehow helpful to your cause.”

“Good.”

Gilbert shuffled in his chair before finally getting up.

“So Lud, I want you to open communications with the Indians. Erzsebet, go look at what is available in terms of resources. Roderich…don’t touch anything. I’m going out for a smoke, and I will speak with anyone and everyone I know as to whether we can expect neutrality or assistance from them once combat starts.”

Ludwig followed Gilbert outside after giving his older brother about a two-minute head start.

“Gil.”

“Yeah?”

“I suppose I’m…” Oh, Ludwig, don’t _say it,_ “nervous.”

“Don’t be. Francis can’t fight his way out of a paper bag,” Gilbert lied through his teeth. “Let me deal with the Slavs. I trust you can handle yourself. You know everything I do and then some.”

Ludwig was never prepared for how heavy Gilbert’s hands always felt on his shoulders. Cigarette smoke burned Ludwig’s blue eyes.

“We’ve got a plan, a great plan, and it’ll take Francis out of commission faster than you can say ‘ _armistice.’_ We’ll make it out of this fine and you can go back to making your odd artwork in the basement.”

Ludwig blinked.

“Have I been wrong before, Lud?”

_Yes, but I can’t remember on what specifically._

“No.”


	3. Migration

Lien was shaking. Lien was not used to shaking, Lien was not used to most of the things in front of her. Her French was good enough for conversation but not good enough for the intelligence briefing and as she understood it she had been given the role of medic, one she knew she wasn’t ready to fulfill on her own without some sort of training. Francis had amassed all of the empire into one room for them to get their hair cut and put in uniforms. Whether or not they were designed with her in mind wasn’t something she was thinking too hard about.

She was cold.

The first to go up was Corsica, unbothered by the cold enough to not hesitate when told to take off his shirt. Lien hesitated at the sight of his skin, covered in tattoos: she made out an anchor, a mermaid, was that a—

 _“Indochine,”_ he said with a grin, flicking his pointer finger to gesture vaguely above his nose, _“mes yeux sont ici.”_

An officer brandished a heavy pair of scissors and grabbed a long lock of Corsica’s black hair. Lien thought she saw him flinch.

_Snip._

She was ferried off to another part of the room where a few officers had made a contingent as to separate the sexes and make the experience something resembling decent.

She wondered where the hell Corsica had found someone willing to give him the _suea._ She’d have to ask Thailand the next time she saw him, or maybe Laos or Cambodia. She failed to keep track of where traditions moved after they left her range.

_What am I doing here?_

She knew the answer to that question but it wasn’t one that she wanted to think too deeply on; it had already been thirty-odd years and she was still reeling.

Maybe if she did well she’d finally be let go.

An officer ran his thick fingers through her dark hair, hefting a pair of scissors.

“Please remove your blouse.”

She complied, revealing her own _kao-yot,_ and closed her eyes. She could hear Thailand telling her what each spire meant, what the nine spire prayer would grant her. Everything he said was clear in her memory even two thousand years later. Wealth, luck, good health, every auspice she could ever hope for—

_Snip._

She stood at attention with her hair hanging just below her earlobes and three pounds of her dignity lighter.

“Are you ready?” asked Francis. She knew enough about French to not enjoy the fact that he used the _tu_ with her.

“ _Oui, monsieur.”_

“Don’t fret too much. It will not last long. You will be home before you know it, and all of this will be a distant memory.”

She had half a mind to ask him what would happen to her if she served with merit, but part of her also knew not to answer questions that she wasn’t prepared to hear the answer to. She instead said the following:

“You speak with much confidence.”

He nodded slightly, the smoothness of his face making her tense. His voice was even, soothing.

“Yes, Vietnam, because I’m going to mount the Germans’ heads on pikes and use them like a fence.”

~~

Arthur was keeping himself from biting off his tongue and swallowing it.

_“We need all the help we can get,” Francis had said._

“Alfred, I imagine you know why I’m here.”

“I’m not helping you.”

“What?”

“I’m not intervening,” he said, smacking his lips before covering them with a hand. He had a peculiar habit of looking just above someone’s eyes rather than make eye contact that most found jarring. “This is your fight,” he continued, gesturing vaguely at Arthur. “Not mine. It’s none of my business.”

“Alfred, I think you’re forgetting something.”

“Mm?”

“I made you.”

“Yeah, well, I had very little to no say in that, but I have plenty of say in this. I’m not sending you any troops. We wouldn’t be of any use anyway, right? Who has a better army than you?”

_We’re about to find out._

“No aide whatsoever? Not even trade routes? I’m still getting partnership from Portugal, even though they will not provide troops in Europe.” Arthur had to keep himself from thinking too hard about Africa.

“I’ll speak with Mr. Wilson. But I doubt much will come of it. Neither of us are too keen on getting involved in a land dispute at the moment.”

“That didn’t stop you in Cuba,” said Arthur dryly before getting up out of his chair.

“Pardon?” Alfred said, tilting his head so his ear could be closer to Arthur’s mouth.

“ _Nothing,_ ” Arthur spat, closing the door behind him as he left.

Alfred had bad eyesight and world-class hearing. _Cuba._

_It’s called the Monroe Doctrine, you bastard. Anything beyond the Prime Meridian is none of my business._

_God, I’ll see what I can do._

Arthur bit back a smile as he walked out of the building. It would sit with him and then he would call his leaders. They’d get financial aid at the very least. Arthur would stop being such an extortionate bastard once he stopped being so good at it or getting the results he wanted from it.

~~

Gilbert’s skin was pink and his hair was frayed as if he had scrubbed his entire body with laundry soap. Roderich, knowing Gilbert’s living habits, would not have put it past him. It was a miracle that Ludwig knew how to use a comb.

Gilbert wasn’t smiling.

“You’re late.”

Roderich, always saving his face rather than opening it, declined to comment.

“India is now out of the question. Our envoy went unanswered and we can only assume that they’re not going to go against the Crown.”

Roderich’s heart sank.

“We have to reach out to Istanbul.”

“Roderich, Erzsi was an Ottoman acquisition, right?”

“Yes. That’s why I need you to be our emissary to the Ottoman Empire; I have a history with him that isn’t quite as gentle as I would care to admit, and I worry that I am too close to it to make a .“

“So do I, though. I tried to get him to become Christian and decapitated him when he refused. You not only forced him to sell his ward to you, but took her virginity—“

Roderich sniffed before scratching at his wrist.

“Those are two different offenses, and one happened, if I’m not mistaken, one thousand years prior to the other. I’m guessing one is going to be more against his values than the other as well; your display of conviction, no matter if he disagreed with it or no, will put you in good favor. He’s not as unified or strong as he used to be. Not as—“

Gilbert smiled wetly. Roderich didn’t like it.

“Not as _strong as me_?”

“Not what I was about to say.”

“What’s going on here, Roderich?”

“I’m trying to cooperate with you.”

“Cooperate? No, this isn’t _cooperation,_ this is _delegation,_ because you’ve maintained the narrative that the northerners will fight and the southerners, you _lovely_ Austrians, do the diplomacy work. What this is telling me is that you, someone who’s made a _career_ off of diplomacy, want me to do the diplomatic work because you have only now realized that you suck _so badly_ at it that I, someone who’s been accused by some of these parties of _eating children,_ am the more palatable option for the parties in question. Is that correct?”

“For the Italians and the Turks? Yes.”

The tip of Gilbert’s tongue poked briefly out from between his thin lips. Roderich was close enough to him to see that his skin was flaking at the sides of his eyes and his temples.

“Lutz and I will discuss an alliance with the king of Italy. The sultan is all yours. I don’t think the loss of Hungary still stings as much as we think it does, plus I’m not going back to Asia Minor for all the money in the world. If I can avoid dying of dysentery again, then I will.” _It’s Roderich’s turn to shit to death._

“A fair compromise.”  
“Compromise? You started all of this. It’s a favor that I’m getting involved in the first place.”

“You’re being strangely reasonable given the circumstances. I’d expect at least a rude hand gesture by now.”

Gilbert licked his lips again. Roderich could hear the faint sound of a gloved hand flexing under the desk.

“Roderich, somewhere deep down inside me I am always flipping you off.”

~~

_Switzerland. Could you possibly be more cliché?_

Gilbert knew well enough to not come to the meeting point in military clothes and therefore both him and his brother were in perhaps _too crisply_ tailored suits.

Gilbert was pretending like he had everything under control ( _Francis wants me dead and buried, the Slavs want me pilloried, the--_ ) and Ludwig somehow _did_ have everything under control. Ludwig had never looked more handsome or more _grown up_ and it made Gilbert’s throat feel tight. He was so _good._

“Do they speak German?” Lutz asked, straightening his shirt.

“One of them does, fluently. I’m sure he can translate if the others don’t.”

“I’ve been practicing my Italian.”

_That’s adorable._

“French?”

“I don’t care for it. It’s an ugly language.”

Gilbert stowed a chuckle in his collar, forgetting the fact that not half a century prior he’d been proud of his fluency in Francis’s tongue.

The door opened and both of them found their way to the two men sitting in the back room, one with straight auburn hair and the other with thick dark hair who was stirring his coffee a little too vigorously.

Gilbert started the negotiations, following protocol perfectly in the cleanest German possible:

“How are you doing, Sardo, you skinny son of a bitch?”

The dark haired man adjusted his glasses and his face spI lit into an off-kilter smile.

“Doing better now, you fish-faced bastard. How the fuck’re you?”

Gilbert turned to his younger brother.

“Lutz, this is Antine Pecora, representative of the Kingdom of Sardinia and subsequently the official ambassador of the Crown and of Italian royal interests.”

“My name is Ludwi—“

Antine’s dark eyebrows furrowed, burying themselves behind his glasses before he spoke accusingly:

“I know exactly who you are. I bounced you on my knee when you were a baby. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten?”

“Let him be, he grew up too fast.”

Ludwig’s cheeks began to flush and the man next to Antine started to laugh. Venice wiped his eyes before extending his hand.

“Feliciano Vargas, ambassador of Venice and of the Italian treasury and banking sector. It’s nice to meet you, Ludwig.”

Ludwig took the hand and all four sat down. A few hours later, the Germans left, bile rising in Gilbert’s throat. Antine had been very apologetic, but no amount of apologies could change the resolution he had made:

_We’re in no place to be fighting right now, Gilbert._

_But you said—_

_That was then. This is now. We can’t help you. We will not be sending aid._

~~

“Did we make the right decision? Not declaring, I mean.”

“Feliciano, have you _looked, truly looked_ at our treasury? It’s the only decision we could have made.”

“That’s not my point. Money is not the issue. Money is never the issue in war. The _issue,_ ” Feliciano pontificated, adjusting his shirtcuffs while he spoke, “is of morale.”

“Morale?” Antine asked, lowering his voice in the crowded streetcar. “What do we need a war for? We just united thirty, forty years ago. We’re _tired._ ”

“No, we need a unified _something._ We need the us versus them, the common enemy. We unified against Austria, yes, but what is the reason for us to stay unified now that Austria is not threatening us? Or _is_ he?”

“Roderich doesn’t give a flying fuck about us—“

“Yes, but they, the _people,_ don’t know that. You can whip up any group of people like egg whites, get them standing stiff and at attention with a few well placed words. And when we’re all standing at attention, with our faces towards the sun and ready to fight Evil, whatever form it comes in, we become more and more combined as countrymen.”

“The more unified we become the more likely it is that most of us die.”

“Well let’s hope you all have reasons to be kept around otherwise, eh?”

“That’s cold, Feli.”

“It’s true, is what it is.”

~~

Roderich had negotiated Sadik into Vienna instead of going to Istanbul and would count that as a victory for himself.

You didn’t have to look long at Sadik to know that he was crumbling. Roderich’s greatest strength was in plastering his imperfections before they became noticeable, blending them pleasantly into the rest of him like a flaw in lacework. Sadik’s strength was in beating his imperfections into submission, and you can only cut so much out of you before you disappear entirely. Sadik was now maybe a third of the man who had laid siege to Vienna a few hundred years prior. Roderich took pride in that. Barring the fact that he had no proper heirs to the empire, he felt like he had himself far more in order than Sadik did. _Maybe I’ll outlast you yet, Turk._

“How are you planning to fight a war if you hate moving so much?” Sadik had asked, licking his lips before sitting down. He had not trimmed his beard in a long time and one of his eyes was bloodshot. Roderich didn’t dare ask why.

“There are other ways of waging war. You know this better than anyone.”

“That’s a pretty convoluted way of saying that your friends and wife will be fighting your battles, don’t you think?”

Roderich smiled thinly, as he was taught to do. This smile had caused as many problems as it had solved.

“Perhaps.”

~~

Adão was a man easily convinced of things, but rarely convicted of them. This made him an excellent discussion partner for about fifteen minutes before it got boring.

“So what is this about your neutrality?”

Antonio templed his fingers and changed the subject. Antonio was not easily convinced of anything and had never believed in anything with conviction in his entire life. No one would know that just by speaking with him. This made him an excellent debater and a dangerous business partner.

Adão was a person who had done far more than speak with Antonio, however.

“Why are you staying neutral?”

“Why aren’t _you_? The conflict has nothing to do with you.”

Portugal had no answer to give other than one he would never admit out loud, so he shrugged.

“Obligations, one would say. But you’re still not answering my question.”

Antonio, turning on all of his baby brother charm (a skill one would think would have evaporated by now, after all he had accomplished), looked back down at his coffee and then up through his dark eyelashes.

“I have my reasons,” he said coyly.

“And they are…..?”

“Antine isn’t joining in either.” _Pick on someone your own size,_ he thought to himself, chuckling at the less-than-favorable comparison between their impoverished oldest sibling and Portugal.

“He’s not an independent landmass like you are. He’s also older than me and, therefore, out of my jurisdiction. _You,_ however, I _can_ bully as much as I like.”

“Is that right?”

Adão remained silent for a moment, allowing Antonio to remember every last time they had physically fought. Antonio decided to only remember the times he had won.

The fundamental difference between the two of them would most likely be that Antonio knew how to pick his battles. And Antonio rarely picked a battle that he would stand a high chance of losing.

“It’s not going to happen, no matter what you say, I’m not joining in on any of this. You can keep yourself busy however you like, but those central countries are of no interest to me.”

“That’s a lie.”

“Perhaps. It’s still none of your business.”

~~

Once every fifty-odd years a nation gets a premonition. Lovino Vargas stood in the in front of a field of wheat and knew, somehow, that all of this would be in flames the next time he saw it. He did not know how the wheat would catch fire, he just knew that it would cause more hunger than any rationed meal could remedy.

“There’s a storm coming,” breathed the farmer next to Lovino conspiratorially before cracking his back. “You’d be best to get on home.”

“And the harvest?”

“Goes the same every year. We have it or we don’t. A little rain won’t change that.”

Lovino smiled, put his hands in his pockets and began ambling back down the dirt road.

“I never got your name, young man.”

_Right. I’m in Sicily._

“Vargas.”

~~

Francis’s ears were bare and cold as a result, a sensation he wasn’t used to, and his joints hurt in that peculiar way where they were bracing themselves for ache, feeling phantom pains in the process.

It was going to be a long ride. Arthur was looking out the window silently.

“Nervous?”

“No,” he lied, trying to quiet the numbers crunching in the back of his head. _How many years since my last genuine land war? How prepared am I for this? How much can I afford to win? How much to lose? Why am I on the ground and not in the water? Is this where I’m—_

“Arthur?”

“Pardon?”

“I asked you a question.”

“Didn’t hear it. Speak up next time.”

Francis inhaled through his long pretty nose. Arthur wanted to hit him.

“I asked you about your colonies.”

“They will do splendidly. I have no doubt in my mind that there will be no problems.”

“Oh, I agree,” Francis chimed in. “This war will be _very_ quick.”

Arthur knew the glint in Francis’s eyes and had half of a mind to pray that the Germans would simply surrender by the end of the week, for their sake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I CAN EXPLAIN 
> 
> //
> 
> anyhow, sorry for the wait. I've hit a bit of a roadblock with this installment since I know so little about World War I in comparison to the Risorgimento and I want to be as accurate as possible while still having a narrative instead of a textbook, haha. 
> 
> Thank you to everyone who's stuck around for the 3 months it took for this to be posted. Y'all are troopers.


	4. Prayer

Salvatore’s English was perfect. Salvatore walked with a cane and a dog and had all the trappings of a fine English gentleman. Salvatore was all of the hopes and dreams of his father and mother and their fathers and mothers before them. Salvatore had been raised with that knowledge and acted accordingly.

Salvatore was not amused.

“If I get one more report of ships docking or leaving here without my express permission and permission of the Crown, heads will roll. Is that understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

_First aid courses, address dispatches, new volunteer corps, am I forgetting something?_

He absentmindedly stubbed a loose board and noticed a rowboat. Ah. Spiro.

_Why can’t you take a steamboat across the ocean like a normal person?_

_If I drown it has to just be me, explained the Cypriot with great conviction. If I die it needs to be an event, not a statistic._

“I thought you were supposed to be back home for briefings.”

Spiro looked up.

“I’ve been planning this visit for three months. No dead Archduke could keep me away.”

“Do-me-ti-os,” said Salvatore, pronouncing his full name half to be irritating and half to make sure Spiro knew he was being serious, “you realize that if this means war, if we truly are about to engage in combat, that we’ll be fighting against Gilbert?”

“Ah, that’s true. It was bound to happen.”

Salvatore was supposed to be trembling at the thought of the Prussian war machine but instead his mind was full of a sunburnt child in armor too big for him with dreams of glory cached in the Holy Land.

“I suppose.”

~~

As always, there were more negotiations to be had, which resulted in Ivan Braginsky and Francis Bonnefoy being alone in a room together. Francis, so friendly, so comically unapproachable. Ivan, who had no idea where he fell on either spectrum but knew he would be misunderstood no matter what method he used. It was a match made in purgatory: begging to be absolved of its existence.

“And England?”

“Couldn’t make it, my apologies.”

_Those Saxons, always so afraid of me._

“When can I expect aid from you?”

“Oh, England and Belgium will send reinforcements as you see fit. I don’t see the point in putting in too much strength over your way; I imagine they’re going to be focusing on us.”

_So why am I here?_

Francis was very attractive, he would admit that much. He’d always thought so. This, he hoped, wasn’t obvious to Francis. It was absolutely obvious to Francis.

“Noted.”

“Your French is excellent, by the way.”

Ivan felt his chest begin to swell in spite of himself.

“Thank you.”

Presently Ivan was somewhere outside of East Prussia and he couldn’t remember the last time his hands had been warm.

A soldier had fallen off of his horse and was in a makeshift sickbay with a broken leg.

“I’m here to take a look at you. Call me Braginsky,” Ivan began, trying to seem as human as possible.

“I don’t want a Jew touching me.”

Ivan stopped before looking back up at the soldier. He looked eighteen at the most. Too young to know how heavy his words were but old enough to know what they meant.

“Excuse me?”

“I don’t want a Jew touching me, is what I said.”

Ivan started to take off his gloves.

“Well either a Jew sets your leg or a gentile cuts it off, and you get sent home before you see a day on the field. Which will it be?”

The soldier was silent.

“Do you need me to let you think on that?”

Still quiet. Ivan left the sickbay before being prompted to do otherwise. _This war is going to take longer than anticipated._ He needed a drink, and not for his nerves.

~~

Not even Jesus and the twelve apostles themselves could have prepared any of the Westerners for what they were currently facing.

Arthur, as he always did when faced with a challenge out of his control, was laughing uncontrollably.

“ _Very quick,_ Francis. Indeed, Francis.”

Francis, who was aware that his feet were beginning to rot in his shoes and that he hadn’t shaved since the last time he’d seen the sun, was not laughing.

~~

Raoul was asleep and dreaming of sunlight when his brother jostled him awake.

“ _Tortue, tortue,”_ Ambroise sing-songed, choosing to speak French entirely for the sake of irony over functionality.

“ _C’est moi, tortue?”_ Raoul whispered, desperate to go back to his dreams of warmer and dryer climates.

“ _Oui_ ,”

“ _Pourquoi_?”

“ _T’es lent_.”

“By God,” Raoul whined, switching to Arabic. “You’re worse than Gupta some days, you know that? Why are you waking me up?”

“You have a letter, _turtle._ And some cigarettes.”

“Give.”

“I didn’t know you’d started smoking.”

“I’m about to, damn it, if you’ll give me my little present.”

Algeria held the small parcel just out of Tunisia’s reach.

“Impatient today, Idriss.”

“Abdelkader—“

“Fine, fine, take it, you’re no fun.”

Senegal lifted their hat to tell both of them to shut the hell up so that they could sleep; they had the 3 AM shift and weren’t about to let the two Arabs ruin it for them.

“Right. Goodnight, _tortue._ ”

“Goodnight, _trouduc._ ”

~~

The ocean was crashing outside and Lovino was pretending that he hadn’t read what he’d just read and that everything was going according to plan. There would be no war. There was no war, in fact, and the whole thing was some bad dream far away that would never touch them.

Except it was at their doorstep, and all three of them had a good probability of stepping in it.

But it was easier to nitpick his brother than it was to nitpick the rest of the world.

“Feliciano, what is that in your hand?”

Lovino’s younger brother looked up from the smoldering wooden trident between his fingers. He was sitting in front of four easels, each with a painting in a different degree of disarray.

“Oh, I whittled this out of some driftwood. It’s so I could smoke three cigarettes at once.”

“That shouldn’t even work.”

“Well, it does.”

Lovino held out his hand, defeated.

“Give it to me.”

Nicotine hit Lovino’s bloodstream at triple the normal rate and he hated that he wanted Feliciano to make him one of these for himself. The newspaper in Lovino’s hands was beginning to grow damp from sweat.

“We’re going to get involved, aren’t we. It’s inevitable.”

“Looks like it!” said Feliciano cheerfully, pushing an angry dark line down the canvas. “Not that any of it matters. We all die one way or another, eh?” Well, he wasn’t wrong. Feliciano rarely was.

“I suppose.”

~~

It was dawn and Laura was making an attempt at vomiting her stomach cramps away in a dead man’s discarded helmet. Half her body was a scab and another third was becoming susceptible to gangrene. How much could they cut away before she stopped growing back?

“So that’s how that works for you?”

Her head snapped back to look at the Irishman who’d snuck up behind her.

“How did you—“

“It’s hard not to hear you, child.” That was an easier thing to say than _the fairies told me._

“Fair,” she said, wiping her mouth on the back of her grimy sleeve.

“I just get headaches.”

“Lucky you,” she sighed, clutching at her tattered abdomen. “I don’t know how long I can hang on.”

Caoimhean laughed, startling her.

“Well, unfortunately for people like us, there’s not really another option.”

“You’re right.”

He sat next to her and pulled her hair back when her stomach began to heave again.

~~

For Gilbert, an invasion was a hot needle inserted into his spine. Present, painful, but mostly irritating. _Fucking Russians._ You’d think he’d be used to it by now, but the sudden scrolling of Cyrillic through his consciousness never got less jarring.

“Whose _fucking_ idea was a two-front war?”

“Yours,” said Erzsi, who had just finished cleaning her gun before loading it.

“I didn’t expect them to come that _fast—“_

God fucking knew where Roderich was in all of this. Gilbert had an inkling, but didn’t think highly enough of himself to claim to know more than God did about someone. His inkling was that Roderich was somewhere in Vienna talking to a mirror about where he’d gone wrong.

“Well, we ought to look on the bright side.”

“There’s a bright side?”

“They aren’t French.”

Erzsi fired.

“Not _yet,_ anyway.”

~~

“Someday I’ll be the one meeting with the general,” Andria waxed, a cigarette dangling from his lips. His skin had gone from brown to gray while absorbing more silt than sunlight.

The wariness Matthew felt around Corsica was something that surprised him. Perhaps because he’d seen the antagonism towards Francis before he’d seen the ease he showed around Arthur; the hushed stories about the fighting and acquisition were numerous and he couldn’t tell which were true and which were fabrications. He also didn’t yet dare ask anyone for clarification, lest they realize that he was eavesdropping.

“Like you were with Napoleon?”

The sudden peal of laughter had Matthew jumping out of his skin.

“I wasn’t a _general_ with Napoleon; the man barely gave me the time of day. Not even my own people respect me enough to give me a leadership position. I’m sure you could understand that much.”

Matthew’s eyes narrowed.

“What do you mean by that?”

Corsica’s mismatched eyes seemed to point themselves out of the darkness, finding Matthew’s with ease. Matthew imagined being older made it easier to be frightening. He would get the hang of it eventually.

“You’re a half-breed. One of those nations born from a nation and a human.”

Matthew’s back straightened. _In more ways than one._ He remembered Francis sitting him on his knee to tell him about his mother, died in childbirth. No human woman who gave birth to a nation’s child had ever lived to tell the tale. _Mi’kmaq._ He pretended he didn’t flinch when he heard the people around him mutter _jackatar_ under their breath as he walked by.

“You’re not human enough for the humans to not shun you and you’re not nation enough for any of us to take you seriously.”

“At least I’m actually a nation,” said Matthew, trying to assert himself in a conversation that was perhaps a little too close for comfort.

Andria’s lips pressed together and Matthew could hear the ghosts of the expletives burning alive on the Corsican’s tongue.

“You still answer to a queen across the sea. We’re not too different.”

Matthew felt his indignation like ice under his nail beds.

“There’s no Prime Minister of Corsica. There’s no Corsican constitution. There’s no Corsican documentation, no Corsican passport, no Corsican nationality. You’re a satellite, a tiny little island in the Mediterranean, there’s no reason you should still exist—”

He stopped when he realized he was speaking aloud and Andria smiled. _Young people forget so easily these days._

“But here I am. And you’ll just have to accept that. Your father has. I suggest, just this once, you follow in his footsteps.”

He didn’t mention that the reason Francis accepted so easily that Andria still existed was because he owned Andria, body and soul, and knew that the moment Andria died he would be able to absorb Andria’s landmass into his own. He assumed that he didn’t have to, but pretending that nobody knew that was easier than accepting that everyone did.

~~

_Bernabò Genovese had a lot on his hands when Francis Bonnefoy fell at his doorstep, seemingly by chance but definitely by intention._

_“I’ve heard about your little island problem.”_

_“He’s always been a handful.”_

_“How much?”_

_“What?”_

_“How much for Corsica. I want to buy him from you.”_ _  
“Corsica is in open revolt and has established its own government. It would be a waste of your money.”_

_Francis, seeing an opportunity for benefit for himself at the expense of someone else in more ways than one, had an excellent idea._

_“I’ll wager you. If I bring him to heel in one week, I get to have him for free. More than that and I pay you whatever price you want.”_

_Bernabò was ready to agree to anything so long as he wasn’t having night sweats about having his throat slit in the night._

_“Agreed.”_

~~

Alfred F. Jones could fly, or at least that’s what he’d tell himself each time his plane crashed down into the ocean. _Test run gone bad,_ they’d say every time they retrieved him. Why not have the indestructible freak fly the prototype airplanes? No lives lost, just a few dings in his ego. What could go wrong?

They’d made a fatal error: putting Alfred in a cockpit left him alone with his own thoughts for hours at a stretch.

 _Matthew_ was out in those trenches, he muttered to himself. _Matthew_ was fighting back the Krauts, _Matthew_ was earning a tiger’s worth of stripes.

“No way in hell are we getting involved over there, you know that. I don’t care how you _feel,_ Alfred, I want you to _listen_ to what everyone’s saying.”

_Says who? Not me, at any rate._

“I’m ready to fight.”

“No one else is, and look at you,” said one official, grabbing Alfred’s bicep and squeezing. “Scrawny.”

_I can’t lift any damn weights if you keep making me fly these planes!_

It reached a point where he hadn’t crashed in awhile and he couldn’t tell which was getting better between his flying skills and the quality of the airplanes.

He remembered back when he lived in Maine and did nothing but split wood before they realized that he wasn’t aging and chased him out of town. Back before he lived in the capital. He was strong then. Was the strength from splitting all that wood or was it from how much faith people had in him? He could never tell.

If he wanted to get stronger was he supposed to go for more exercise or was he supposed to go canvass houses to ask them to love him?

What could he even offer in comparison to the others? He’d crunch the numbers. There were sixteen armies bigger and more well-prepared than his was. So why were they so keen on him getting involved?

“It’s more a symbolic thing than anything,” someone had explained to him.

 _Everything’s a symbol these days,_ grumbled the actual walking symbol of a landmass.

The thing about accidentally nose-diving into the Rocky Mountains was that nobody was around to hear your last words before your body did its best impression of an accordion.

~~

Raoul was learning more with each passing day that the idea behind colonies was that brown-skinned men would fight the wars that white men declared.

 _“Je meurs, tortue,”_ Ambroise groaned, body wrapped in barbed wire and flesh being cut clean like red clay.

“No, no, you’re fine,” Raoul lied in Arabic, looking up at Lien with lots of bandages and not many solutions. _We need an actual doctor._ It surprised him that of all of these immortal beings surrounding him, very few had decided that they wanted to know anything about medicine.

_I had more important things to worry about—_

Algeria was fading fast and Francis was nowhere to be found.

~~

“Algeria half-suffocated from mustard gas and died of sepsis from barbed wire wounds last night,” said Matthew.

“He’ll come back.”

Matthew inhaled through his nose.

“Where were you when all of that was happening?”

Francis choked back some dirty water.

“I was in a meeting.”

“Ah, excuse me, didn’t realize those couldn’t be skipped when someone’s dying—“

“Matthew, this is war. People die. And if there’s the possibility that someone else can suffocate who isn’t me, I’ll take it.”

“Francis—“

“If they are ready to die for me, who am I to say that they cannot?” Francis made eye contact with Matthew, his eyes were so _blue,_ and—

“You’re in no place to tell me anything about how to approach my colonies, either. I’ve seen more than enough about what you’ve done to your—“

Matthew smiled, pushing filthy blond hair out of his face.

“I learned from the best, Francis.”

Francis’s mouth closed.

“Good night, _papa._ ”

~~

“Has there been any correspondence from the western front?”

“Plenty,” said Nikola, dropping a parcel of letters. “These are all from your brother.”

“How is he?”

“I’ve heard nothing but good things; he’s been injured multiple times but each time he’s been regenerating quickly.”

 _Probably faster than I am,_ Gilbert mused, absentmindedly rubbing a fresh scar that was still sore, flesh knit together so fast that the cells didn’t even understand yet that they existed.

“I’m looking for more bright points,” said Erzsi, flopping down to read a letter from her conspicuously absent husband.

“Have you found any?”

“Yes. As awful as this is, at least we don’t have to worry about the Italians.”

 _Fuck._ He hadn’t even considered the Italians getting involved, and even then having the audacity to go against three empires (barring the fact that two of the empires in question were falling apart at the seams, but there was the possibility that all three of them had been too busy wrestling for power that they hadn’t noticed).

“Gil, if there’s anyone who wants to be a pain in Roderich’s ass, it’s Feliciano and Antine. And if there’s anyone who would want to be a pain in Roderich and Sadik’s ass simultaneously, it would _also_ be Feliciano.”

“You mean there could be a _third_ front?”

“Yes. And, God willing, there will never be one.”

_Gilbert…_

Each letter had a sense of being simultaneously a prayer and a newsreel. Ludwig had seen combat before, but it had often been from behind Gilbert’s splayed fingers.

“I have to go to him.”

“Gil, your place is here—“

“He’s struggling, he’s all alone and it’s my fault. I should go and make this right. I need to—“

"What you need to do is listen to me.”

Erzsi’s eyes stood out clearer when the rest of her face was dirty. It always caught Gilbert off guard.

“Your best bet at getting to him and not ruining our chances of winning would be to stay here and help me ruin the day of a few Russians.” _Stay here and be one of a few people I know who will stay by me when it’s not necessarily convenient for them. Be my one ally here who isn’t about to turn to dust if I push too hard._

_~~_

_Gilbert is proud of me, everyone is so proud of me—_

Ludwig couldn’t breathe and it was only partly because of the gas.

_Why are they proud of me?_

_Why is any of this something to be proud of?_

Gilbert did this for a living. People did this and enjoyed it.

_I never want this to happen again. I will do everything in my power to make sure I and anyone else never see this level of bloodshed—_

He finished his vow before taking shrapnel to the throat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay, life happened a little bit. I'm including translations for words that don't seem super obvious, can add more if necessary! 
> 
> Trouduc: asshole 
> 
> Jackatar: a racial slur indicating a person of mixed French/First Nations ancestry, specifically in Newfoundland.


	5. Empire

You’d be damn pressed to convince Feliciano of anything he didn’t already believe to some extent. Arguing with him was nearly impossible.

The catch, of course, was the same thing could be said of his older brother.

“Feliciano, I’m physically larger than you and work all my days in a field—“

“What, and that means shipyard work does nothing for your muscles?”

“I never said that, but what I’m saying is if we were ever to get into a fight it would take a miracle for you to drop me.”

“Braggart.”

“I’m nothing but factual. It would be impossible for you to knock me out.”

It was true that Lovino was built like a draft horse; it was also true that Feliciano was no waif himself.

The comment smarted between Feliciano’s eyes for what felt like days before he got an idea.

He pulled a small vial out of a dresser drawer, left over from something he didn’t quite care to disclose.

 _This much would drop an elephant,_ the apothecary had confessed to him when he’d purchased it. _What on earth sort of ants are you dealing with on your estate?_

 _Big, nasty, Africanized ones,_ Feliciano had lied, stowing it in his coat pocket and trotting out of the store.

What time was it? Lovino was going to be having coffee at this point, wasn’t he?

Feliciano nosed himself into his older brother’s study. Lovino’s eyes were so trained on the diagram in front of him (something anatomical in relation to the human body, from the looks of it) that when Feliciano grabbed his small cup of coffee he didn’t react. The reaction was reserved for when Feliciano mimed putting it up to his lips. Feliciano let out a tiny whine at the feeling of his brother’s thick hand closing tightly around his forearm.

“Make your own damn espresso.”

“You make it better.”

“It’s the same coffee. We make it the same way.”

“You put love in yours.”

“I do?” Lovino downed his coffee in one loud gulp and Feliciano grimaced.

“Or something. Maybe more sugar.”

Lovino’s head hit the table at a rate that would have alarmed his younger brother if they didn’t live forever. He’d wake up with a nasty headache in a few hours. The smile on Feliciano’s face was pleased but far from pleasant.

_It’d take you a miracle to drop me._

They always said miracles could come in the tiniest of bottles.

~~

Antine could not spend more than five minutes thinking about something other than money or war.

_Antine, neither of those things are in your control. You ought to be thinking about all the sex you’re not having._

He snorted into the webbing between his fingers, pushing his glasses back onto his thick nose. He hadn’t slept in three days. It showed.

He could feel the energy between him and the brothers, humming anxiously across the sea from him. Even though nobody had said anything indicating mobilization, the three of them had seen enough of the world to know when it would drag them into relevance.

Feliciano played loose and fast with the lives of those around him; he’d recently poisoned his older brother on a dare gone awry. Lovino had been fine because of Sicily but Antine couldn’t afford someone pulling that kind of nonsense on himself.

_What kind of fucked up culture do we nations have when murder is a practical joke?_

_One where only the good die young._

Like a man trying to piece back together a broken clock while missing two of the pieces, Antine started to go back over what the Germans had offered them in exchange for their intervention.

_Trentino and some of the Littoral. Perhaps Tunisia. All after the fact._

Antine was not about to open his pocketbook for a promise he wasn’t sure was going to be kept. They’d also said that the pact was defensive but both parties had immediately gone to offensive positions. Antine was also not inclined to enter an alliance with the man he’d just spent years fighting to set his surrogate brothers free of.

The door opened and a man with a small bit of paper came walking in.

“Sir? Telegram.”

“Where from?”

“France, sir.”

Yes, more people Antine didn’t feel interested in talking to. What a day, what a day. The paper tucked itself between two of his fingers before he finished reading it.

_Near three thousand years old and you still get surprised every damn day._

“Please contact both Feliciano and Lovino. Tell them to come at once. It’s very important.”

_~~_

_Fact: a nation can subordinate another’s territory in one of two ways. A subordinate nation has a higher chance of losing their immortality and dying from any wounds sustained; if there are no heirs to the territory then the territory is absorbed into the “superior” landmass. There are many reasons this arrangement may come about, but as previously mentioned, there are only two methods to officially subordinate a territory. One method is a contract of slavery, used often by empires. The other is a contract of marriage, used often by royalty and frightened and lonely people who should have known better._

_~~_

There was a monument, a pavilion with a sculpture. Some said it was in Catania, some said Palermo, and some even said Syracuse. Some thought there was more than one. You and I know better.

Up seventeen steps, covered by the pavilion’s roof, lay a white marble statue of a woman. Her eyes were closed and her thick hair was piled up behind her head. Something about the calm set of her mouth and her hands, resting right where her belly button should be, gave one the impression she was going to wake at whatever moment was most convenient for her.

Nobody really knew who had it erected in the first place but it was generally assumed that it had sprung out of the ground near overnight and nobody could remember a time where it hadn’t been present.

Accepting the presence of the monument was just as easy as it was to fold leaving offerings to her into local superstition. Wedding rings were blessed in her presence, flowers and cuts of grain left at her feet, first blooms pressed into the cold grooves of her curls. At times it seemed she was smiling, at others it seemed her face was blank. She never frowned.

Every now and then a three-pronged flag would be erected near her and would be sheepishly pulled down at some points during state visits, and other times proudly fluttered in the face of the mainland. It depended on what they believed she wished.

Everyone knew who the woman was but nobody would say it out loud. Some things were better left unsaid.

~~

At every reconnaissance mission Spiro flew he wanted to take the pistol strapped to his hip and start shooting at every person he saw. German, French, he didn’t care, he just wanted it to be over.

Spiro was called on many missions that required him to fly low to the ground because nobody did it as well as him.

“What’s your secret?”

“Hmm?”

“How do you fly so well and so low?” asked the young English recruit.

Spiro leaned in, smelling like oil and sweat.

“The secret is not giving a shit whether you live or die.”

When he finally crashed his eyes went blank except for a memory of Salvatore’s face. _Let me come back to you._

~~

“So the Ottomans are going back on their neutrality?”

“Yes, they lifted their blockade for the Germans.”

“And those two ships we were making for their navy?”

“Still in progress. They’ll leave our harbor and go to Constantinople once they’re finished.”

Salvatore rubbed his chin, other hand closing tighter around the knob of his cane.

“Not anymore.”

“What?”

“They’re ours now. We’re keeping them. We need all we can get.”

“But that’s—“

“The Turks should have thought about that before turning to the Alliance. Tell the King. He’ll say I’m right.”

~~

_Fact: it is in fact a great honor to have a nation as a prisoner of war. You can work them for longer and they can be used for bargaining much more efficiently than human lives. People are very ready to do anything to have their nation back._

_~~_

Maybe it was the injuries he was seeing, maybe it was the constant nausea and fatigue that was plaguing him, but Ivan could not shake the feeling that something was very, deeply wrong. He had to go back.

_People are dying here in droves. They’re dying for you._

_People die everywhere for me,_ he had to remind himself, stifling a cough into his scarf. _People die every damn day for anyone and anything._

When was the last time he’d felt this sick over something? He either couldn’t remember or didn’t want to, and neither were helpful.

“All well?

Ivan didn’t feel like being clever. He felt like being drunk.

 _“_ Someone get me a drink.”

~~

Ludwig was hungry.

He’d never felt like this before, beyond hunger from his body and impulses but a kind of hunger that branched itself out from between his ribs like a beacon. The only thing on his mind was consuming whatever was in front of him.

He looked at a young officer next to him and had the thought of grabbing him by his nostrils, suffocating him and biting into his throat. Put them both out of their misery while the life faded between Ludwig’s canines. He’d be dead but Ludwig would be satisfied.

He’d heard Gilbert tell him stories of what Antonio had seen when he went to Mexico the first time, of offerings of still-beating hearts and flailing limbs. He understood now.

 _It’s that blockade,_ he’d heard one of his commanders say, poking the rib jutting out through his torn uniform. They’d given up making him look good and started hoping for him to just look alive.

Was Gilbert feeling the way so many people’s stomachs were shriveling into themselves?

~~

Gilbert was not one to silently shoulder pain in the presence of friends.

“I’m going to _die_ if I don’t get food—“

“You took a bullet to the face yesterday, you can handle not eating for another few hours.”

“I’ll eat dirt.”

Erzsi hadn’t smiled in weeks.

“Feel free.”

Gilbert grabbed a clot of dirt and began to slowly drag it towards his mouth.

“Gil, I’m divorcing Roderich.”

Gil was suddenly not hungry anymore.

“What.”

“You heard me.”

“No, what?”

“I’m leaving him.”

“Can you even do that? Isn’t that something he has to initiate?”

Erzsi’s eyes moved to meet Gilbert’s. The set of her jaw told Gilbert that she couldn’t be convinced of anything other than her being right.

“He’ll want to initiate it by the time I’m done with him.”

“What for?”

“Take a damn look around you.”

~~

Arthur had left the battlefield on business. War-related business, but his eyes were still focused on some middle ground where barbed wire usually was.

_How many people did we have stationed in Constantinople? Will they all be moved out easily? Will this be the one thing in this godforsaken circumstance that will actually go smoothly?_

The Maltese sun had yet to forgive him for the transgression of having skin paler than skimmed milk. The king had been gracious enough to grant Salvatore the privilege of supervising naval operations, keeping him away from combat on land and therefore away from the front lines due to the fact that he could not walk without a cane; Salvatore did not find this gracious and found it more degrading.

“How much has the front changed? How useless would I be, really?”

When looking at him Arthur got the distinct impression of looking at both a child and at a relic. _All the knowledge of swords in the world couldn’t protect you from what they can do to you now._

“More than you could possibly imagine.”

“How is Spiro?”

“He’s missing.”

Salvatore leaned forward and Arthur wasn’t ready to look into his eyes but was forced to regardless.

“What do you mean, missing?”

“Missing in action. There was a reconnaissance mission that went wrong. We think he was taken.”

“Not even with all of your magic, not even with the fact that he’s subordinate to you—“

Arthur was surprised in all the ways he hadn’t expected to be.

“I thought you were against ‘devil worship’.”

Salvatore went silent.

_Not with him._

~~

Antonio was holding an envelope that only deserved to be called filthy and knew the handwriting from anywhere. Laura.

Antonio didn’t know why he was thinking so deeply on her writing him; she hadn’t spoken to him in years and it was for good reason. He imagined it was less because she wanted him to hear what she had to say and more because she knew he was a captive witness. You can only tell a story to the same audience so many times.

_Antonio,_

_I don’t even know what to say other than—_

There were about five pages of Laura’s thoughts, some cut out but mostly intact. He didn’t like that she seemed to only see him as a last resort, but when your name becomes a synonym for “doormat” you’ll ask just about anyone for love and respect. Whilst he read Antonio’s molars worked the inside of his cheek into a bloody mass.

_Antonio, why aren’t you here? I’m scared._

_Why can’t you help her?_

_You know why. There’s nothing you can do._

He had no money, no strength, nothing left to give. That had been true for a long time.

He threw the letter into the fireplace and regretted it immediately.

~~

People were drunk because it was the only way to not think too hard and Ambroise, beautiful Ambroise, had come back to life in spite of Francis’s deep desire to keep his land. The gleam in his eye was in full force but it gleamed like gunmetal rather than sunlight. Matthew respected him.

“Ambroise.”

“Francis isn’t here. Call me by my actual name if you can pronounce it.”

“Ub-dul-kaw-der.”

“Abdelkader. You got a name from before your father named you?”

“Can’t remember it. I like yours, though. Love hearing old names.”

Ambroise’s laugh quickly turned into a wheeze.

“ _Mathieu_ , we all love what we don’t have. It’s why Corsica loves tits and my sister loves money.”

_I’d know my first name is my mother hadn’t died bringing me into the world—_

Matthew’s brother’s hand closed too easily into a fist and Matthew’s mouth formed sharp things faster than soft ones.

“Do you love freedom that way too?”

Ambroise, sober, looked back at him without flinching.

“No, because I had that and will have it again.”

~~

He came back to consciousness when the gun shoved between his ribs.

He could not speak English in his panic but would be beaten each time he responded in Greek. Spiro had more blood caught between his teeth than words.

 _Do-me-ti-os Ko-mo-dro-mos,_ he would repeat. _Spiro._ He finally coughed up the English name he’d been given, the one that had usurped his Greek name on his English papers: _Stephen._

 _Stephen,_ they repeated back to him. _Stephen._

He wondered if any of the people in front of him had ever been given a name other than the one that their mothers had whispered in their ears after they were born. That was always the first thing they would take from you after they took your independence. The rhyme that the other colonies would singsong at each new addition rang in his ears: _First the claim, then the name._

Funny how it worked when you were so old; it took so much to make you hurt but it felt like a greater affront each time it happened.

Four days into his captivity Spiro woke up to a familiar face, thin and raw and squinting into the darkness.

“Giselbert.”

“It’s Gilbert now, you old son of a bitch.”

“I thought you were with a different division.”

“Came to visit.”

_Gilbert, you’re a terrible liar._

“But word has it that you would know. They said you’re a spy.”

“Is that a surprise to you?” Spiro’s eyes were swollen shut and his lip was split, but Gilbert could make out the smirk in the Cypriot’s voice.

“They want to know everything you know about us.”

“I gathered that. I’m sorry to say I know very little. They have me because I fly low, not because I have good eyesight.”

_Spiro, you’re a terrible liar._

“If you don’t say something they’ll beat you to death.”

“Me? And let this beautiful face perish from the earth?”

Gilbert went silent. Spiro was a bouquet of yellows and purples from the neck up. God knew what the rest of his body looked like. His mind went back to the last time they had been this close to each other; Spiro had been naked from the waist up, his armor discarded around him like the leftover shell of a walnut. It had been a millennium and a half prior. Spiro had fallen on a knife for him and was being seen by a healer.

There was nothing Gilbert could do. Spiro was going to die here.

“Yes. You.”

~~

Somewhere in Sicily Lovino sat at a statue’s feet. The three-pronged flag had been pulled down hastily and stowed in the bushes. The locals seemed to think he wouldn’t notice.

He got up into a kneeling position, looking up the length of her body. Part of him wanted the statue to tilt its closed eyes down to look at him.

_Wake up. They need you. They have for a long time now._

So many years and he’d never once been able to perform a magic trick. As a child it had been common to see coins formed out of the palms of his father’s hands, his mother pulling silk scarves from her long black hair or a concubine clapping her hands and turning into a flock of doves.

What he’d give to vanish into birds at this moment.

_I’m not enough._

It had been too long now for him to weep for or rage at her memory, so he chose to pray to it instead.

After kneeling for a time that was longer than he’d care to admit, he stood and walked down the road. He was needed elsewhere.

 


	6. Diplomacy

 

_ Carthage and Phoenicia were seated and discussing something that had transpired in Ionia when young Corsica came bursting into the room, naked and fleeing from his bath. His twin sister was right behind him, equally naked, wrist gripped firmly in Corsica’s hand. A maidservant hovered anxiously at the threshold of Ashtoreth’s room. _

_ “Ame, why does Sardinia have a built in pocket?” _

_ Phoenicia squinted at her son. _

_ “Hannô, can this wait a moment?” _

_ Carthage leaned back, eyes fixed on his nephew. _

_ “Of course.” _

_ Phoenicia turned back to her son. _

_ “Ahumm, what do you mean?” _

_ Ahumm turned back to look at his sister. _

_ “Arishat, show them what you showed me in the bath.” _

_ Arishat grabbed a small stone figurine off of her mother’s table and pushed it neatly up into her vagina. Ahumm pointed accusingly as Arishat stood with her legs spread and a large smile on her face. _

_ “See? She has a pocket!” _

_ Phoenicia’s face blanched and Ahumm’s uncle Hannô fell over laughing. The maidservant gasped, clasped a hand over her mouth, and ran out of the room. Corsica’s mother was only able to let one word escape her mouth: _

_ “No!” _

~~

Lovino sat at his kitchen table shaking his head and Feliciano could do nothing but lean against the counter and stare at his shoes.

“Francis smelled blood.”

“You know, he wasn’t wrong, either.”

“Mm.”

“Very tempting.”

Antine had already made his way back to Cagliari, leaving them with the stipulations the French were giving if Italy were to enter the war on their side. It was significantly more substantial than the offer they’d gotten from the Germans, which had more or less amounted to a “ _ please? _ ”

“And they’re sending someone over to talk about it with us.”

“Do we know who?”

“I can think of a few people Francis would send on his behalf.”

“Why wouldn’t he show up himself?”

“We’re not all like you, Feli.”

“The only way to make sure that a job is getting done is to do it yourself.”

Lovino sighed through his nose.

“In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a war on. I think he of all people has the right to delegate at this point.”

~~

_ It was a long time before the birth of Christ. Corsica sat and watched his mother stand over his friend, drowned after falling into the sea. Corsica had sworn up and down that it was an accident and that Ashtartiaton’s fall was because the ball had been thrown too hard and he had stumbled off the side of the boat, but he still had the feeling that his mother didn’t quite believe him. It was commonly known that Corsica had always played a little too hard with the things he loved. _

_ “And you swear that he’ll come back?” _

_ “I’m going to bring him back if you stop talking and let me work,” she said evenly before she took a knife and plunged it into her wrist with the same calm as if she was cutting into a fish. _

_ “Ahumm, you know what we are,” she began, gesturing to the inanimate human body in front of her: _

_ “We are their hopes and ideas made flesh. Our blood runs for them. When we shed our blood, it means they will either live anew or they die. So in some cases, when the gods have a looser grip on one of the souls we rely on to stay alive, we can make a bargain with them in exchange for a small fee of our own life-blood.” _

_ The blood fell into the dead boy’s open mouth and his eyes stuttered open, lungs pushing seawater out of his chest cavity and causing him to spill off the altar and onto the floor, writhing and coughing back to consciousness. _

_ “Remember that.” _

~~

Over two thousand years later and an older, taller, dirtier and far more tired Corsica stood in front of the man who bought him from Genoa.

“I’m pulling you out to send you to Italy.”

Andria remained silent. 

“Rome. I’m sending you as an ambassador in the hopes that we can get Italy to enter the war on our side. You speak the best Italian of all of us, and you, well—“

Andria’s face shifted from perplexedness to a smug understanding with a speed that Francis found alarming, but didn’t bother to comment on.  

“So to cajole my brother.”

“Yes.  He wouldn’t listen to me after—“

_ After you bought and kept me as property and have no intention of stopping? _

“…everything. So I want to send you as a token of goodwill.”

Andria nodded.

“Get out. Someone will be here for you in a few hours. Try to get as clean as you can.”

Easier said than done. Andria didn’t know where the filth ended and he began.

~~

_ When Corsica and his twin got to be of a certain age they asked one question in particular that made their mother wonder if she was ever going to do a proper job of being a parent: _

_ “Ame, what happened to our father?” _

_ Ashtoreth looked down at her hands. Hannô looked away. _

_ “He jumped into the ocean and sunk like a stone.” _

~~

Andria hadn’t realized how long it had been since he had last been in Rome. His two escorts were both Frenchmen, one from Tours and the other from Toulon; neither of them had that connection to Corsica necessary to feel the discomfort building just under the collar of Andria’s shirt. He’d already sweated crescents into the starched white linen under his arms.

When one gets to be a certain age and spends enough time in more than one place, those places start to weigh on them. Sometimes that weight is like a blanket that welcomes and warms your way to the front door of home. That was how Andria felt about Ajaccio.

In other times, the weight of a place is one that someone finds manageable, neither pleasant nor unpleasant. They can be beautiful or ugly, big or small, but they leave no strong feeling other than longing, since these types of places make one cherish the warmth of others. That was how Andria felt about Paris.

At other moments, a city could feel two inches off from being home, a facsimile, where functionally it could be exactly what you needed, but something intrinsic about it was wrong and could not be fixed by human hands. That was how Andria felt about Montpellier.

When they entered the city Andria felt the weight of Rome dropped square on his forehead, the dull ache rippling down to his shoulders and out through his nose. If he had not been quietly tempering himself in his memories on the way to the city, Rome’s weight would have easily bludgeoned him.

They rounded a corner. More than a thousand years later and he knew exactly where they were. The older scars on his back began to throb.

_ That’s where I was traded for a horse. _

He tried to remember how beautiful, how fast that horse was that it would merit him being in bondage for nearing two thousand years with no end in sight.

He didn’t know how he would react if he came near the Coliseum. He wanted to stay as far away from it as possible.

_ Antine, how do you manage coming here day after day?  _ That corner that used to be an auction block was right in the middle of a busy intersection now. The spot itself was right in front of a bar. Did Antine go in every now and then for beer? Did he remember? He had to remember.

He’d always been the smarter twin, Andria rationalized while ducking his long nose into his coat collar. He’d always been the one to be able to separate himself into palatable chunks rather than being the world’s largest bitter pill.

~~

Antine was at his desk in Cagliari when he received a telegram:

_ Sending someone over to discuss allocations stop He will be expecting you stop  _

“Well, that’s unfortunate,” Antine said out loud while grabbing for his coat.

He remembered back in the day when there was no ferry service to the mainland. It was lucky that Rome was a port; he knew Lovino would speak for ages on how hard it was to get from Rome to Catanzaro by train or by horse.

_ Maybe all this ferry business will make a seaman of me after all. _

~~

_ When he and his twin were first sold to Romulus they had both been known to cause trouble; when Romulus wanted to be sure that Corsica would not run away, he would leave the small boy under a large urn.  _

_ Once or twice someone who wasn’t Romulus would do the same, but leave a viper in the pot with him and joke about how the pot danced while Corsica tried to get away from the angry snake’s teeth. _

_ Sometimes it would last for hours. Sometimes long enough that the air inside would run out. Long enough that Corsica would lose consciousness. Hard enough that he still can have nightmares of the hard clay closing around him, of the fangs gripping into his bony ankles and wrists like manacles. _

_ ~~ _

Corsica was a large man. Being flanked by two smaller men only made him look larger. The man from Tours wiped his brow with a handkerchief that he’d clearly only been able to wash once since his deployment. Andria looked over to his left with a facial expression that the twenty-year-old had no idea how he was supposed to interpret.

“Nervous?”

The man from Tours tried to smile, thin lips pulling into a grimace.

“I’ve never been to Italy before.”

Andria tipped his head back and laughed.

“You’ll be fine. They’ll take care of you.”

“But this is business.”

“Nothing is business in Rome,” Andria lied just as the door opened. His lips pursed slightly when he met eyes with Feliciano. 

Feliciano, ever the businessman and the first of anyone to realize when he’d been given a raw deal, was the first to break the silence.  

“You?”

Corsica’s lips sucked back inside his mouth, pressing into a line before he responded.

“Yes. Me.”

“Why?”

Before Andria tried to ask what on God’s green Earth Feliciano could possibly mean by asking “why”, Lovino appeared at the foot of the staircase. Lovino’s chin tilted upwards and both of the men at Andria’s side took a step back.

Andria and Feliciano’s sense of power came from their eternal youth and approachability; Antine and Lovino’s power came from the fact that both of them were older than some mountains and would not let you forget it for an instant. Lovino didn’t look much older than anyone else in the room. Lovino didn’t  _ need  _ to look older than anyone else in the room. Lovino just had to look  _ bigger,  _ which he somehow accomplished while Andria stood perhaps a head and a half over him. 

“Your two gentlemen escorts have quarters elsewhere. I suggest they go find them.”

Andria glanced over at the two Frenchmen next to him to ask for an explanation and received none, only feeling the gust of wind from their departure.

“Andria, you’ll be sleeping in Antine’s room while you’re here. The telegram said five days, which will be more than enough time for me to determine whether or not I have to kick you out in three.”

Andria neglected to tell Lovino how much he looked like his mother and nodded, moving ahead and up the staircase. He was too used to being outclassed by his surroundings to pay attention to how nice the furniture was.

Antine’s décor was an interactive display of less empty and fully empty whiskey bottles coupled with an ugly painting he’d done in the 16 th century that he refused to throw away. None of his arm-height surfaces were clear and two of his walls were. Antine’s writing desk was a collage of forgotten coffee cups and scraps of bad handwriting.

Andria did what any respectable younger brother would do when let into his sibling’s room and rummaged through all of Antine’s drawers.  _ Knife. Another knife. Old photographs. Inkwell. Another knife. Crumbling manuscript to a romance novel. Dust bunny. Three knives, wrapped in twine.  _

Andria’s groping fingers hit something that felt like stone. His hand closed around it and he pulled out a long thin strip of lapis lazuli on a golden chain.

_ Phoenicia, Sardinia and Corsica sat huddled in the corner of a dark cellar. Sardinia was the closest, nestled into Phoenicia’s chest. Corsica was clinging to her arm. The door opened and someone called for “the woman.” Sardinia struggled closer as the two men grabbed onto Ashtoreth’s shoulders. Sardinia’s tiny fingers were wrapped around her necklace. _

_ “Look after your brother. I love you,” Phoenicia said before she was finally dragged out through the doorway, off to be sold. The chain broke and the bar remained in Sardinia’s hands. _

_ Corsica could not remember what Sardinia said in response. All he remembered was that he would not stop screaming. _

Andria sat, crosslegged, cupping the necklace in his two large hands.

_ How did you manage to keep this safe from Romulus? _

He dangled it in front of his nose, letting it rock back and forth between his fingers.

_ Hell, how did you manage to keep this safe for two thousand years? _

He put the necklace down and nosed further through the drawer, stumbling across a metal box with a lid and a lock. He went and grabbed one of the less empty whiskey bottles and went to work at the lock with one of the dull knives Andria had already pulled from the inside of Antine’s desk.

The lock sprung open and the pressure of the contents of the box caused it to burst open.

_ Letters. Fuck, a lot of them. _

He had to read them.

“Find anything good?”

Andria jerked backwards and away from the box full of letters, turning to meet his older brother. Antine was leaning on the doorframe and pretending he hadn’t been watching his twin for the past five minutes.

“Nah, just some dust where there shouldn’t be.”

Antine looked down at the necklace on the desk. Andria rapped two fingers directly next to it, breaking Antine’s concentration.

“How the fuck did you keep that away from the Romans? I wasn’t even able to keep my nose rings, let alone a pretty thing like that.”

_ Corsica was taken next, struggling and biting before finally being beaten into submission. A far younger, much more feminine Sardinia took the bar of lapis lazuli, squatted, and shoved it into her special pocket.   _

“I had my ways.”

~~

All four of them were seated adjacent to a meeting room where others were discussing whether or not Italians would die or live for their countries in the coming months. Their backs were against the wall, shoulders pressing into each other. If they were completely silent, they could make out a few words being said in the meeting room. One phrase in particular made Lovino repeat it out loud:

“Brothers in arms.”

Feliciano’s lips tilted around his coffee.

“In more ways than one, no?”

“Do you see me as your brother?”

Feliciano looked back at Lovino.

“Of course I do. What kind of question is that?”

“We weren’t raised together; it’s a valid question.”

Feliciano rolled his eyes.

“Lovino, I call you my brother.”

Lovino gestured with his coffee cup.

“I can call this cup a bowl, but that doesn’t make it a bowl.”

Andria looked over at his twin brother before looking back at the other set of siblings in the room. Antine shrugged before quietly grabbing for the flask he’d hidden inside his coat.

Lovino finally turned to look at Antine:

“You lived with some of your younger siblings as a child and then others you didn’t live with. Do you feel like you’re more brothers with Andria than you are with Antonio or Adão?”

Antine took his time with his mouthful of bourbon before speaking.

“Well…it’s different. Andria and I are twins; as a result I’m closer to him than I would be to my other siblings. That’s not because we lived together, though.” Antine looked over at Andria. “He’s my brother regardless of proximity.”

Andria hummed.  

“I do think our relationship is better than yours, though, but that’s because we’re not sharing a landmass. There’s no debating which of us has what the way you two do.”

Antine leaned back in his chair, sprawling his long legs in front of him. Feliciano was trying to show by facial expression alone how unimpressed he was.

“You, as siblings and as adults, have to be ready to give and take and not play victim whenever you feel there’s a transgression—“

“Hold the fuck up.”

All three turned to look at Andria, whose chin was resting on one of his fists.

“Antine, you’re incredible.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know exactly what I’m talking about.”

Antine’s mouth broke from a straight line into a smirk.

“Nope.”

“Yeah you do.”

“Andria, what are you talking about?”

Andria looked back at Lovino before grabbing his twin brother’s flask and taking a swig deeper than some coalmines.

“Antine’s  _ piece de la resistance  _ growing up, what he would always do, was he’d scream for our mother at the top of his  _ fucking  _ lungs before slapping me hard across the face. I’d get pissed and go to hit him back right as mom would walk through the door. This  _ fucker— _ yeah, see, he’s not even sorry about doing it, he’s laughing—“

“I was five—“

“No, oh my god, you’d do it all the time. If you broke something you’d say I did it and I’d get my ass kicked.”

Antine pushed his glasses up over his thick nose to wipe his streaming eyes.

“I don’t think she ever caught on.”

“No, she didn’t. You were that good.”

Antine looked back up at Lovino and Feliciano.

“I suppose what you need to learn more than all is how to  _ forgive, _ ” he finished, going back to his bourbon.

Feliciano and Lovino exchanged looks. Neither of them knew where to start with that.

_ ~~ _

Arthur Kirkland was not allowed to leave the front lines, but was expected to help with negotiations on the Italian front to some extent. This had less to do with anything that the British had to offer and far more to do with the fact that the French did. His desire to be present in some way but having no means of doing so physically resulted in Arthur Kirkland leaving the responsibility of persuading the Italians to his older brothers.

This was a mistake.

Long enough after the moment in the meeting room with the Italians, Antine was leaving in a dark enough mood after arriving in London just that morning. He was never a man to enjoy slow beginnings. Alasdair, meanwhile, was a man who knew how to start things but rarely knew how to finish them. He left that type of affair to his younger siblings.

“Let’s speak, you an’ me, one no-name bastard to another. Ye—“

The knife buried itself into the wood next to his ear, the metal singing an aria that made Alasdair’s eyes water. Antine’s face was half an inch away from his, close enough that Alasdair could finally make out the shape of his eyes behind his spectacles and smell the faintest trace of sour whiskey on his breath.

“Well, now.”

The knife pulled itself to hug the strip of skin between Alasdair’s shirt collar and his beard. Antine’s thin fingers sat spider-like at the hilt, open to suggestions.

“I’m the firstborn and heir to Ashtoreth, living Nation of Phoenicia and therefore from the same house as Carthage, Spain, Portugal, Corsica, Sicily and Malta. Royal blood runs through my veins. My birthright is two thousand years of purple silk and gold. Yours is sheep and a bog. The only no-name bastard here is you.”

The knife retreated from Alasdair’s throat and found its way back into the sheath at Antine’s hip.

“Don’t forget it.”

Alasdair touched the angry red line dangerously close to his jugular before it had the chance to knit back together.

“Got a lot to show for it, don’t ye?”

Antine smiled.

“More than you do.”

~~

“Feliciano, I’m going to find some ham.”

“Don’t take too long.”

One of the stipulations of moving up to Rome to live with his brother near full-time was that there was an underground room for Lovino’s use as a less palatable study. Given the need of doctors as of late, Feliciano and Antine had gladly provided the funds for it.

“Unless this is some mainland custom that I don’t understand, that is not ham.”

God, why did neither of them make any noise when they moved?

“Nothing.”

“That’s a dead body.”

Lovino’s deep breath cost him a few brain cells from the smell of formaldehyde.

“I’m practicing sutures. You know, just in case.”

Andria always moved a little too quickly for Lovino’s taste; it reminded him too much of Andria’s half-brother Antonio.

“Those are different from the ones I’ve seen.”

Lovino glanced to his left. When Andria followed his gaze it fell on a portrait of Serafina, partially obscured from view.

“When I went away to America, I figured out a more efficient way to treat and sew up lacerations and bullet wounds.”

_ Bullet wounds.  _ Lovino must have been motivated, no?

Lovino disliked how close Andria was to the scalpels. Andria’s eyes moved back to the unsmiling portrait of Lovino’s late wife on the wall.

“You know, she and I were betrothed when we were younger. Back when we were still living in her father’s city.”

Something about him and the way he was looking at her image made Lovino feel like he was either lying to get a rise out of him or just trying to commiserate, or somehow both simultaneously.

“You were?”

“Yes. We were first cousins. Our parents were very intent on keeping the royal line pure as possible.”

Lovino felt like he knew where this was going, but chose to answer anyway.

“What happened?”

“Her father was brutally murdered a long evening’s walk from here and we were sold into slavery to different owners. Life comes at you fast.”

Andria stepped closer. When Lovino’s hands left the cadaver’s face its mouth fell open.

“What you need to know is this: she’s going to come back.”

Lovino’s mouth twisted. Andria took half a step back.

“Corsica, she’s gone. She’s never coming back. She’s been gone for decades. She would have resurfaced by now if she was ever meant to. Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think I spend hours at a time when I go down south wondering if I’m really hearing her voice on the damn wind? Don’t you think, after years of searching, we would have shown results?”

Andria squinted at him and Lovino knew exactly what he was going to say before he opened his mouth:

“But you didn’t look. You left.”

Lovino laughed.

“Your turn. Leave. Take your things. Get out of my house.”

_ Three days. I was right.  _

 


	7. Inundation

Jett and Jack had never been left to their own devices quite like they had been here, and while Jett was reveling in the freedom, Jack had other thoughts about it.

“Arthur sent us here to die. That’s why he’s gone.”

“Then I’ll die with the sunshine,” Jett retorted, stretching his back and wincing when it audibly cracked. Jett’s back cracked three more times, his body slowly increasing in size and width after squeezing himself into smallness for months on end.

“We’re here for reconnaissance. It might do you service to make yourself less noticeable.”

“They’re going to notice me—is that a dog?”

“Jett—“

He hadn’t petted a dog in what felt like years; and what a dog this was! Fluffy tail and feathery ears, and a big smiling mouth with a lolling tongue. She must be some kind of shepherd—

“ _Jett—“_

He was gone, leaving Jack entirely by himself.

“ _Jett!”_

The dog bowed in front of the Australian and ran down the street, barking, wagging that big fluffy tail while she trotted off.

“You want me to chase you!”

He hadn’t run that fast in ages. He had to pet this dog. What a dog, _God,_ what a dog—

She kept woofing, almost irritated that he wasn’t moving as fast as her. When he finally caught up to her it took all of his strength to stand in the alleyway. She kept walking forward into the dead end and Jett stumbled forward before falling to his knees. A man stepped out from the doorway at the end of the alley, walking forward to scratch the dog behind the ears. Jett was young enough to not know which nation this was, but old enough to know one of his own kind when he saw them.

Seven pairs of foreign eyes glided down Jett’s broad back.

“Good girl, Sabir,” said the nation in accented English. _“Good girl._ ”

It was only staring down the barrel of a Turkish gun that Jett realized he was in over his head.

~~

“This blockade is starting to concern me.”

Francis sat next to Arthur silently counting his own ribs, marking down which ones were broken and which ones were about to be.

“Now? What happened? Running low on German chocolate?”

Arthur shook his head.

“It’s a matter of time before they sink some civilians.”

Francis looked up, forehead compressing into three sharp lines.

“They haven’t already?”

“Not that I know of.”

“You can tell when there’s this much going on?”

Francis hadn’t been able to hear the voices of his civilians on the home front in a long time. There were more important things going on.

~~

Ludwig was a man who was ready to do what was necessary if it meant keeping chaos at bay. Gilbert had raised him to put practicality as Lord and Savior over his personal beliefs, and while he was often accused of being too central in his mentality it also usually kept him out of harm’s way.

That being said, Ludwig was not going to get into a U-Boat, and his dedication to keeping himself where God could see him was starting to make his commanding officers nervous.

“Someone else will go. It’s not worth it.”

Ludwig’s eyes did not leave the ground.

“What, are you scared? They’re perfectly safe.”

Ludwig was not afraid of dying. Ludwig had died before and would most likely die again. What Ludwig was afraid of was for all of the young German men locked in a small vessel, trapped like rats when Ludwig was still walking the line between sanity and starvation.

“Ludwig, what would your brother do?”

_Gilbert would do whatever was asked of him if it meant he was left alone otherwise._

“I’ll go. I’ll lead the mission.”

At least two had to restrain from clapping their hands. Ludwig could taste copper in the back of his throat.

“Wonderful.”

~~

Most nations with The Gift got about five seconds of warning before their powers went haywire; this was perhaps the third time in his entire life that Arthur had been overtaken with a vision unprovoked.

Not a good scenario when you’re being shot at.

He counted one, two explosions before going deaf with all of the sounds of people crying out for him.

He counted no voices when he was snapped back to present with a bullet marching right into his gut.

He came to on the stretcher, wondering what would happen if the dead men the medics were stepping over decided to reach up and take his place.

He decided that at this point he might as well let them.

~~

Alfred awoke drowning in his own cold sweat. The windows were open to the late Maryland spring heat that threatened to swallow him whole.

_THE SHIP THE SHIP THE SHIP THE SHIP THE SHIP_

He tore off his nightshirt and stalked, nude, down the hall. There were reports that Abraham Lincoln would take this same route through the building. Those in his way wished they’d seen Lincoln instead. Alfred had never stood straighter.

“Mr. Wilson, sir!”

No response. The creaking Alfred heard implied that someone was listening, albeit not speaking.

“There seems to be a boat problem, sir!”

The hall stayed silent, the only thing echoing being Alfred’s impending migraine between his ears.

“I think you oughta get that checked out!”

Again, no response. Alfred turned back and walked to his bedroom. A gust of wind hit his bare ass, four shades lighter than the skin on his face and arms. He hoped Honest Abe liked what he saw.

~~

“On his first U-Boat assignment, my younger brother thought it best to sink a cruise ship.”

“It was a British ship. It’s par for the course—“

Gilbert pointed at a line in the casualty report.

“There were Americans on board. He pissed off the United States.”

Gilbert rubbed his chin before covering his thin mouth with a greasy hand.

“Gil—“

“This is a disaster.”

“It probably wasn’t his choice—“

“I need to talk to him.”

~~

“How’s the monster lab in the basement?”

Lovino didn’t feel like answering that question seriously. At the rate he was constantly inhaling the fumes, he was starting to wonder if he was exhaling formaldehyde instead of carbon dioxide.

“I’ve been stitching arms together. We’ve got twelve now, all in a horrific spindly sort of sphere.”

“Do they stand straight?”

Lovino was just thankful that Feliciano was in a good enough mood to let Lovino talk out of his ass for a few minutes. He’d been darker lately. Everyone had, but him in particular. Lovino imagined it was distress at the borders of Feli’s territory, but didn’t feel the need to press too hard lest Feliciano snap.

“Sure thing. Rigor mortis is one hell of a thing, Feliciano.”

Lovino’s younger brother turned back to whatever novella he was reading.

“I ought to send you someone who will jump off the table when you get your bone saw.”

Lovino’s lips clenched.

“If you did that to me and we ended up ever being in a situation where I did have to sew you up, I’ll let you bleed out on the floor.”

Feliciano hadn’t blinked.

“Jesus, Lovino, don’t take these sorts of conversations so personally.”

Feliciano dog-eared his hard-covered, first edition of a specific Keats anthology in translation, the third of its kind. The paper seemed to cry out at the indignity of it all. “What does it matter if we bleed out, anyhow?” Feliciano continued. “I’m not going to die.”

“We all die, Feliciano.”

Feliciano shook his head.

“No, no, not us, we don’t die. We’re like bicycles. One day the people won’t need us anymore and they’ll leave us to rust in a shed somewhere.”

“That’s even worse.”

“It happened to dad, it happened to his dad, it will happen to us. That’s what they do. Like they do with their gods when they get bored of them.”

Lovino lowered his voice as if he was afraid that the older gods were listening, forgotten like the dust on top of the bookshelves.

“If Dad was to be believed, his grandfather was Mars and his great-great grandmother was Venus.”

“Well, sure.”

“What?”

“We’re both beautiful enough. I know _I_ can hold my own in a fight or two. Same as you. Don’t see why he’d lie about something like that,” Feliciano said, face twisting as if Lovino had just fed him something sour.

Romulus had been clever enough to show one side of himself to half of those close to him and another side to another half, making it impossible for all who had known him to work together in painting a coherent portrait of him.

Lovino’s eyes were fixed somewhere outside the window.

“I do.”

~~

Arthur wasn’t healing as fast as he was supposed to be healing. Subsequently, Francis was starting to think about how many of them there were going to be by the end of the conflict, and drew the conclusion that they were all going to die but at least they all deserved it, one way or another.

Francis had Andria and a young, smooth-faced and very much underage recruit named Étienne flanking him when he went to speak with Arthur at the field hospital.

“Am I allowed to see him?” Andria hadn’t spoken since he’d returned from Rome with his tail between his legs. Francis saw the exposed wound and let his tongue drip salt across it.

“I think you’ve done enough diplomacy work for the next few centuries, don’t you?”

Francis didn’t like Andria silent, but he would gladly take it over Andria talking. That was how he felt about most of his colonies, although he would tell most otherwise.

The two held back while Francis made his way to Arthur’s bedside.

“I see you’re sitting up now.”

Arthur did not make eye contact.

“I see your hair’s falling out,” was the only response Arthur could muster.

Francis had managed to hide the spots where he’d been tearing his hair out compulsively from his commanding officers, but such things were difficult to conceal from someone who had been picking apart his appearance since before the time of Christ.

“At least I have hair to lose in the first place, eh?”

Arthur’s hair stood perhaps a third of a centimeter off of his scalp, ready to march into nothingness if it was deemed necessary. It was less fashion forward and more louse preventative.

“Want to tell me what happened out there? What did you see?”

Arthur’s eyes darkened, still not looking up at Francis.

“There was water.”

“Horrifying.”

“Shut up. God, so many people couldn’t breathe. I had to remind myself it was a vision, otherwise I would have convinced myself I was drowning. It had to have been civilians; they were too scared to be soldiers.”

Francis dropped the newspaper in Arthur’s lap.

“Well, your foresight has never lacked for anything.”

His head bowed as he stuck his nose about two inches away from the paper. _Please, my love, will you start using those reading glasses I got you on the outskirts of Avignon—_

“The _Lusitania?_ ”

“Yes, unfortunately. Seems the Germans thought it was carrying ammunition.”

Arthur looked away from the article.

“Was it?”

“Might have been.”

“Arthur—“

“We do what we must. The captain volunteered. I wasn’t about to tell him no.”

Francis thought about taking the newspaper back to keep Arthur from poring over it and then thought against it.

“There is a silver lining. I got a note from Alfred.”

“Oh?”

“He lost a few on that boat and now that it’s personal, it looks like he might intervene after all.”

“Of course. That’s what we need. A savior.”

Francis laughed.

“We’re not exactly doing a marvelous job of saving ourselves out here, now are we?”

“No. I guess we’re not.”

The two appointed guards spent the duration of Francis and Arthur’s conversation with their hands in their pockets and unsure of what they were allowed to do with their bodies in a space so dedicated to life or death. Étienne found himself looking out after one of the less harried looking nurses, then averting his gaze when he met hers. Étienne wasn’t yet used to the age in the eyes of some of the nations on the field; when the Indochinese woman looked him in the eye it made him a little too aware that he was lying about his age. She looked away when Andria’s head turned to see why Étienne had started holding his breath.

Corsica opened his compass, staring intently at something inside the lid. Étienne could make out the small circle of a photograph tucked in the lens. He saw the potential for a conversation and took it.

“Who’s the girl?”

“Mm?”

“In your compass.”

Corsica shook his head while the arc of letters over his ribs prickled hot under his shirt.

“There’s no girl.” He turned the compass into better light. “This is a picture of my dog.”

How Andria had managed to get a dog that large and frightening to sit and pose for a photograph was beyond the soldier. He imagined at that age, all was possible.

Andria would tell no one that he had gotten the glamorous photograph of his beloved mastiff by tying a sausage to his forehead. He went back to counting the whiskers on her face, Étienne went back to staring at his shoes, Lien went back to doing more of what she barely knew, and Arthur and Francis kept pretending they loved each other less than they thought.

~~

Lovino walked in on Feliciano painting something in the middle of the kitchen floor. Lovino assumed he was using some kind of parchment, but couldn’t tell by how dark it was.

“Lovino, we’re entering the war. I decided this morning.”

“I sent Andria away with—“

“I know you did. That was stupid of you. He made some excellent points.”

Feliciano was mixing the red with blue and the sound of the paint knife knocking against the ceramic plate he was using made Lovino’s hair stand on end. He didn’t like the way Feliciano was looking at the scene he was creating on his canvas. He said what he said with everyone he loved but couldn’t explain his love to.

“Go to sleep, Feli.”

Feliciano didn’t budge.

“When you pay your keep and have Austrians chewing at your extremities I’ll say the same to you.”

~~

Gilbert had never been one to keep weight on, but Ludwig found himself taking half a step back when Gilbert came through the door looking more skeleton than human. The burning look in his older brother’s eyes didn’t make him less reaper-like, either.

“Can you explain to me what that was with the U-Boat?”

Ludwig was not inclined to look Gilbert in the eye when Gilbert’s looks could kill just about now. Ludwig could make out the faint pink marks where the skin around his eyes was still trying to recover from frostbite.

“Well?”

“I was following my orders. There was a good chance that the boat was carrying ammunition.”

“Two torpedoes?”

“No, I only fired one.”

“That’s not what I heard, Lud.”

“And where did you hear it from?”

_A French newspaper that Erzsi had somehow acquired, because confiscating reading materials from the POWs is the only way she can feel alive lately._

“I hear things.”

“Well I’m telling you I only fired one torpedo. It ignited all that contraband ammunition they said they couldn’t possibly be carrying.”

The distant, glassy look in Ludwig’s eyes while he described how he’d singlehandedly killed nearly two thousand people was starting to make Gilbert a little nauseous.

“The Americans are furious.”

“I know.”

“They might even join the English.”

“So? Who cares? We already have Japanese who’ve stolen our holdings in China. What’s another power coming to play in a battlefield that we’ve already got ourselves locked into?”

“Lud, that’s—“

“Would you have done the same?”

Gilbert did not like the word that was coming out of his mouth with such ease.

“Yes—“

“So what’s the _issue_ if I do exactly what you would have done in my situation?”

Gilbert shook his head, rubbing at his scarred temples.

“You’re not supposed to do what I do, Ludwig. You’re supposed to be better than that.”

~~

And what will you do, grandsons of Venus and Mars, when challenged, when menaced, when threatened? You will do what your father did best. You, descendants of the she-wolf, will bare your fangs. You will go to war.

It was May when Feliciano, Lovino and Antine signed their lives to lead their movement for that which they had yet to recover.

“Well. Feliciano, Lovino, you are both dismissed. Your assignments will be coming in a few hours, once we know exactly who is needed where. Antine, a moment.”

Antine made a point of remaining seated and hiding his legs so that the king would not be reminded of how short he was to the point that Antine was slouching as far down into his seat as humanly possible. Feliciano reached over to push on the top of Antine’s wiry black hair before disappearing out the door.

“Tell me, lad. You’re around them far more than I.”

“Your Majesty, with all due respect, you were born in Naples. Lovino bounced you on his knee as a baby—“

“That’s the last I’ve truly spoken with him. You aide me far more than those two combined.”

_Never really had a choice, now did I—_

“These two, what can they do? Can they work together?”

Antine leaned forward and the illusion of his smallness was lost.

“Your Majesty….. I have never encountered two siblings so deeply incompatible. It’s not a question of competence for either of them; they are both wildly skilled and intelligent people. But they have no respect for each other.”

“So—“

Antine adjusted the glasses falling down his nose.

“Your Majesty, at the most optimistic, we’re doomed.”

Victor Emmanuel III’s lips moved behind his well-oiled mustache. Antine couldn’t tell what face he was making and was starting to wish he was able to grow a beard so he could better conceal his own grimaces.

“I will keep that in mind. Thank you. You are dismissed.”

“Your Majesty? Before I leave, I have to ask. Will I be stationed with them?”

“No.”

“Oh?”

“You’ll be with your own kind, my boy.”

Antine, one of the few men on Earth who was actually an island, realized once again that he’d forgotten who his own kind was.


	8. Ashes

What was that in the air? Pine needles? Dust? Gin? Self-loathing? All of the above; it was the smell of Antine’s breath hitting Feliciano’s nostrils, and he wanted absolutely goddamn nothing to do with it.

“Feli, get up.”

Feliciano hadn’t been on a horse in a long time. Being thrown wasn’t something he was accustomed to, but blacking out from impact was something he’d expected even less from himself. Antine lifted him up and draped his arm over his narrow shoulders, half helping him walk and half dragging him along.

“Jesus, I’m out of shape…”

“Damn straight. You were sitting like a sack of flour on that horse’s back. It’s no wonder she took off. How are you feeling?”

“Where’s my rifle?”

“It was on the back of your saddle.”

“And the horse underneath the saddle?”

“Recovered, pissed off but perfectly fine. I’ll get you a dumber horse next time around, yeah?”

“Why the fuck are we even using horses? I thought we were above that now.”

Antine’s gin-soaked breath hit Feli’s nose again.

“Feli, we’re broke. In fact, even more broke than usual. Do you think we can afford an all-terrain automobile for every soldier? We’re in the mountains. This isn’t a hillside picnic.”  

Feli’s bottom lip pushed out slightly.

“I’m not every soldier.”

“Like hell you aren’t,” Antine said, remembering how Feliciano had only taken fifteen minutes of unconsciousness to mend together a broken spine and leg.

“But it’s faster up here to go that way anyhow. I need you to adapt. Lovino’s been swiped for diplomacy and I need to leave to be with my own brigade soon.”

Leave it to a declaration of war to make one think that there weren’t enough Italians to represent all of Italy. He didn’t know how Francis or Antonio managed to do anything by themselves.

“Here’s a question for you: why am I up here and not with the Navy?”

“When the fuck has Austria ever used any of his beautiful boats? He just leaves them parked in Trieste to remind us that we’ll never have it back.”

Feliciano removed his arm from Antine’s shoulders and began walking on his own, stumbling like a foal on his newly reformed legs.

“I’ll dissolve him myself for that fact alone.”

~~

It was the dead of winter, a few months before the Italians got involved in this worldwide scramble and much farther East than either had ever maintained power.

Kiku Honda was in a familiar office with a more than very familiar person. Kiku had read that kings in old Persia had extended chains down from the roofs of their throne rooms to hang crowns above their heads.

The person in question had chosen a far simpler route, and had a long sword behind his writing desk.

“Kiku, do you know what type of sword this is?”

Both of them knew damn well Kiku knew what that sword was.

“It’s an immortal blade,” Kiku answered in Chinese.

Wang Yao smiled.

“Yes, very good! I imagine you know the history of the metal used in it, correct?”

Kiku knew better than to not give Yao the satisfaction of a recitation of all that Kiku had learned from him.

“Legend says that seventy meteorites fell to the earth, each with a precious metal inside. Nations cannot be killed by any material known to this planet, but since the metal inside was not from our planet, it could be used to destroy our physical forms permanently. This metal was highly sought after and rarely pure in form, but if something was created with more than half of the meteorite’s metal it would still be lethal. Many people have immortal daggers, but very few people have immortal swords due to the scarcity of the metal.”

“Precisely,” Yao conceded, lifting the weapon off of its hooks.

“Three of these swords are in existence. One is in the British Museum, the other was lost. There are lots of names for this kind of blade. The Phoenicians called this type of metal _mjannyut._ If I’m not mistaken, that word translated to _honor_.”

Yao removed its sheath, tossing the sword between his two hands. Kiku’s emotionless expression remained unmarred.

“They are known for the simply _marvelous_ way the metals combine, making something that looks much like marble in the blade.”

“I can see that.”

“I don’t think you can, Kiku. Here, I’ll be more than generous. Have a closer look.”

The smooth edge of the blade rested itself right at the curve of Kiku’s jaw. Its presence blistered against Kiku’s skin, but had yet to cut into him.

“I know you must think you’re capable of asking many things of me at this point. I admit, you have a reason or two to think so based on my own carelessness in dealing with you and your… _people_. But, to clarify, you do not have the right to ask any things of me at all, let alone twenty-one of them, so I suggest…”

Kiku could have moved, but stayed still while the sword finally started to sink itself into his neck, just enough to dirty his shirt collar and make him finally wince.

“…you reconsider. I hope I’ve made my position clear, Kiku?”

Kiku hadn’t looked away from Yao once. That didn’t seem to intimidate Yao in the slightest, which was starting to make Kiku uncomfortable.

“Perfectly, sir.”

“Wonderful. Glad to hear it. And will you take that information back to your superiors?”

Kiku nodded, not flinching when the movement peeled a set of gills into the side of his neck.

~~

Ivan had been feeling nauseous for different reasons; being forced to look Tsar Nicholas in the eye was not helping him in that regard.

“You’re certain of this?”

“You’ve gotten the reports yourself. I shouldn’t have to tell you. Send an appeal to the British.”

Nicholas grunted.

“Quit with such heavy drinking. See if that helps.”

Ivan wiped his mouth and glanced down at his full flask, uncharacteristically having been untouched since last night. _He’s finally lost it. He’s here taking personal control of the army and he’s lost his mind._

“I need to drink for other reasons, Your Majesty. Please ask your allies to send aid in the Dardanelles. That’s what they’re for, yes?”

Nicholas was wrapped up in something else, but given how his shoulders tensed it seemed like Ivan had managed to get under his skin. That was all he could ever need, anyhow.

“And do be sure that you’re keeping a close eye back home while you stay. They miss you, you know.”

Nicholas’s shoulders knitted together even tighter.

Ivan grasped his flask and downed it completely the moment he was out of sight, coughing at the end.

_I’ll drink as much as I damn well please. You try doing this sober._

~~

It had never been anyone’s intention that Salvatore be directly involved in the Gallipoli campaign; Arthur had, in fact, pleaded with officers that Salvatore be left out of the conflict and be stationed indefinitely on his island with the naval reserves, but war has always been a chaos of necessity. But after they had gotten news from poor little Jack about Jett having been captured, it seemed necessary to broker a deal with the Turkish opposition. And who better to get a Turk to submit than a very upset Maltese man?

Salvatore sat at a desk while the nation from New Zealand issued a statement.

“He saw a dog and he ran and I tried to run after him—“

“Jack—“

“—and it’s all my fault, I should have been more clear with him that—“

“ _Jack_ —“

Salvatore had to slam a fist on the desk when Jack started rambling in Maōri.

“Thank you for your time, but we know all of these things already. What I need you to do is stay low and try and ferret out where they’re keeping him. Sadik is a reasonable man, if not a jackass, and will respect being bested if it’s done in a tasteful way and by his rules.”

Salvatore put on his reading glasses (which he’d bought for this trip) and produced the ransom letter with a flourish that he’d been practicing in a mirror before Jack had arrived on board.

“He doesn’t actually want our money; if he wanted our money he wouldn’t have taken a captive who was immortal and in his prime. Unlike what many would have you think, rarely does one has the stamina or vitriol to torture someone for all of eternity.”

Jack didn’t like the familiarity Salvatore seemed to have with the subject at hand. Salvatore put down the letter and took off his glasses.

“What I’m saying is he’s probably fine, and the sooner you ferret him out the better.”

Jack nodded.

“Now get out. We’re counting on you.”

Jack, who’d watched Salvatore grow from a boy into a man at an alarming pace while he remained a teenager, had never known quite how to address him.

“Sir, may I ask a question of you?”

“Of course.”

“How many people have you tortured?”

Jack got enough of an answer from how Salvatore froze.

“I was a knight, not a sadist.”

“Arthur said that back then you could do whatever you wanted with people so long as they weren’t Christian.” _That’s how I happened. That’s how Jett happened._

“Nothing that I did back then will have any way of affecting how Sadik treats Jett,” he answered evenly, knowing Jack wouldn’t be satisfied but also knowing that his non-answer would be evasive enough that Jack would drop the subject.

Jack conceded and left the cabin, leaving Salvatore to toy with his reading glasses before snapping them in half and throwing them out the window. It was only when he heard the _splash_ of them hitting the open water that Salvatore regretted his action.

~~

Jett could feel his calf pushing up against what felt like a radiator when he regained consciousness. His arms strained against the pair of handcuffs being used to contort him into a kneeling, prone position in relation to what felt like a large pole behind him.

The room was dark; the only light came from the moonlight filtering in through a window just far enough that Jett was unable to reach it. The light fell on a pair of wet, glowing black eyes and a tan muzzle. The dog moved to sit down out of arm’s reach, causing the keys on her collar to jingle.

“Here, doggy-doggy-dog,” he whistled, kissing and snapping his fingers with a quiet desperation that he’d learned from his father. “Here, doggy-doggy-dog.”

She sat, a Sphinx at the doorway, and did not budge. She didn’t know what his command was, as a proper Turkish dog who was never spoken to in English, but she knew a sweet-sounding voice with an ulterior motive when she heard one. She only moved at the sound of boots coming down the hall, revealing themselves to be worn by a Turk larger than Jett had remembered him to be back in the alleyway.

“So,” said the Australian, trying to lean himself against a surface as to seem poised and brave. “You’ve succeeded in capturing me.”

“So I have.”

“What do you plan on doing to me?”

Sadik stood in the darkness and allowed for it to mask his facial expression better than his automobile goggles were currently doing.

“How old are you?”

Jett cleared his throat.

“Old enough.”

That got a laugh out of Sadik, but not a terribly friendly one.

“Boy, do you know who I am?”

Jett had heard stories from Arthur, seen paintings of the Sultan’s court and of swords, thieves, and dancing girls in droves. Jett also was smart enough to know some story-telling when he saw it. Jett was also unfortunately stupid enough to question all sorts of things whenever he saw them to be potentially questionable.

“You’re the sick man of Europe.”

The laughter continued and Sadik’s heavy boot collided with Jett’s jaw. The boot then remained there, pinning the younger man’s face and throat to the floor. Jett had never known the sensation of choking on his own tongue before this moment.

“Say it again.”

Jett couldn’t form his lips around English words with the sole of Sadik’s boot so firmly pressed up against his jaw.

“ _Say it again._ ”

The lack of oxygen left Jett seeing red spots; he made noise only when his jaw popped from the pressure.

Sadik was about to see if he could pop his skull like an olive underfoot when Sabir began to growl at something down the hall.

“Lucky you,” Sadik said before lifting his foot and following her.

Jett held his breath until Sadik was out of view, finally lurching upwards and wincing while his body snapped back to attention. He’d never been healthy enough on his own that his bones would knit back into place without prompting. Maybe that was a good sign.

~~

 

_“We can’t have a victory. They’re too persistent.”_

_“We might not have a victory, but we can make them have a defeat.”_

_“What do you mean?”_

_“If we kill enough of them, maybe this can all end. Stop worrying about our position and just…” Falkenhayn made a hand gesture that Ludwig was not comfortable with associating with human lives._

_“Explain.”_

_Falkenhayn brought out a sheet of paper full of figures._

_“I see.”_

_Ludwig didn’t._

Ludwig’s mind was in the strategy room and his body was on the field. The numbers filed their way down behind his eyes. Five to two. 1,220.

“So we’re doing this?”

Ludwig was still bitter that he had been installed permanently with the army after the debacle with the _Lusitania._ The look on Gilbert’s face at the news that he was to take Ludwig’s place and be stationed at the beck and call of the navy was one that would haunt him for longer than he’d like to confess to. Gilbert had never had the strongest set of sea legs.

“What could go wrong?” he mused, knowing that everything already had done so at this point.

The guns hitched. There was no time for them to decide otherwise now.

~~

There are men who have been in over their heads since the dawn of time. Francis was one of those lucky few.

When 1,220 guns opened fire on his position he reacted as any other rational being would.

“If I get out of this alive, I want you to know that I’m going to _retire._ No more for me! I’m done! No more! What the _fuck!_ ”

Raoul, the poor Tunisian, who had taken seven bullets on Francis’s behalf, was keeping his fingers crossed that this denunciation of _élan_ would hold for longer than the next few hours; Francis was never one to enjoy fighting when he was the one doing the bleeding.

“I’m a man of my word! I will never fight again!”

Ambroise looked over at his brother, Ambroise having taken every other bullet that Raoul had neglected.

“Remember what Sadik used to say? If you have to tell people you’re a wise man, you’re not wise?”

Ambroise had to hide the steam caused by his laughter hitting the cold air and keep cover simultaneously. The call from Francis made him cease any and all expression of joy.

“Ambroise, get to the front.”

_Am I a man, or am I a curtain?_

~~

Ludwig did not like how tense his commanding officer was when so many of the opposition were laying dead in front of them.

“Sir?”

“Ludwig, this isn’t good. They’re not dying as fast as I’d hoped. My numbers were wrong.”

_What is fast enough? What is wrong with you? Do you want to build houses with the bones left over from today?_

“Divert a few of your best soldiers to Douaumont. See if we can take the fort. Shouldn’t be too difficult at this rate.”

“Why Douaumont?”

“I need _something_ to show for all this blood spilled _,_ damn it all.”

~~

_Arthur,_

_Jett’s been captured by a Turkish contingent. We are still looking for him; if all else fails, I will broker an arrangement with them in which he and others are returned in exchange for Turkish captives. I will admit that next to none of what we strategized is going according to plan._

_I will write again when I have an update on either Jett’s location or if the operation is compromised further._

_Regards,_

_Salvatore_

_P.S.: Has there been any word on the retrieval of Spiro?_

Caoimhean had always said that if a man wanted peace he should never read his mail. Arthur had never gotten so many concerned letters about his colonies before. First Cyprus, lost somewhere with the other German detainees. Now Australia in the Dardanelles? There was a pressure building right between his eyes that he was trying desperately to ignore. He wasn’t too worried about Jett; Jett had always had excellent healing capabilities and with both Jack and Salvatore looking for him, he would most likely be recovered. But the way Salvatore had been bridling at the fact that Cyprus was still missing did not sit well with him in the slightest. Of all the times he would like to be home to discuss this with his superiors in a safe, rational matter…..now was the time, most of all. He hoped none of them could detect that willingness, otherwise he risked being left with them otherwise, but that desire surprised him.

And letter after letter from Alfred, who seemed to have an abnormally abstract concept of time for someone so young.

_Arthur, I’ve heard all sorts of things about the Huns._

_Arthur, is it true that in Belgium they’re leaving women to…_

_Arthur…_

_Arthur…_

“Make up your own damn mind about what you hear,” he hissed, lighting the ugly typeface with his broken lantern.

“Leave the reporting to the journalists, leave me out of it, I have my own things to worry about that aren’t you,” he continued to no one in particular.


	9. Dusted

Four Sardinian radio-men, two Sicilians (cousins, but they did not know that yet), one Neapolitan, two thick-shouldered Calabrese recruits, and one quiet young man from Lazio sat in a cluster trying to communicate effectively with one another without exercising enough discipline to actually speak high Italian. As their dialects were close enough together to be understandable to each other, the Calabrese contingent, the Neapolitan, and the Sicilians were speaking the most.

“Our man is here,” one Sardinian began, tipping his chin frantically over to a new tent on the rocks. “Did you see him?”

“Even if I didn’t see him, I can feel him.”

“Like how Giuseppe mentioned his phantom leg. Ever present, even when absent.”

“Yeah, exactly. Does he look how you imagined him?”

“He’s skinnier than I thought he would be. He looked bigger in the photograph my father had of him.”

“Your father knew him? Did he recognize you?”

“Idiot, he knows who we are already.”

“Must be nice to have a nation to yourself,” cut in the Neapolitan, punctuating his interjection with a sidelong glance towards the men from Calabria and Lazio. “We have to share ours with half the peninsula.”

Motherless and feeling the aforementioned phantom attachment rubbed raw by the conversation, the two Sicilians sat in uncharacteristic silence.

“Least we _have_ one,” one of the Calabrese soldiers responded at last.

One Sicilian looked up, shoulders straightening out; you could see the small tag on his shirt that said his surname: MENDOLA.

“I think she’s still alive, if we’re being honest.”

“How would that be possible? Everyone felt it when she died.”

“Did they? Or do they just _think_ they did?”

“My uncle told me that everyone felt a…a _twinge,_ and they all smelled orange peel and saltwater for a split second. Word got out a few days later and they had the funeral – “

“That’s horseshit. How is that possible?”

The other Sicilian was clearly getting very frustrated, scratching the back of his freshly-shorn head.

“What do you mean, ‘how is it possible?’, there was a funeral! Her brother and the other Italian nations carried her casket and the mayor and the heads of families from all over put down flowers—“

“No, not _that_ part, I know the funeral happened, I just mean that if a funeral happens then there wasn’t necessarily a death.”

“Why would they lie about something like that?” interrupted one of the men from Calabria, who had MAZZEI written squarely on his helmet.

Mendola glanced conspicuously around him, convinced that this action would ferret out an unmentionable and therefore absolve him of his ideas.

“I think they’re keeping her as a pet.”

“Who? Like—“

“ _Yes_. One of the _cosche._ ”

His Sicilian compatriot scoffed.

“That’s ridiculous. You’ve heard the stories about her, right? You think she’d let something like that happen to her?”

“She’s a married woman, not a damn juggernaut. Those nations still act like people. If one of the _cosche_ had something over her head, I imagine they’d be allowed to do all sorts of things to her.”

Even Mazzei felt this was far-fetched enough to start warranting some snorts.

“I think the story they tell is true. She died in childbirth.”

Mendola shook his head.

“Then where’s the baby?”

“Can’t you fucking _read?_ The baby died too. It was there in the report. The baby was strangled by his own umbilical cord, was then born with no heartbeat, and held form for about thirty minutes before turning to dust. Sicily turned to dust about five minutes after that.”

The other Sicilian, who had the name LA ROSA penciled onto a card in his wallet in case his body was unidentifiable otherwise, found himself now agreeing with Mendola.

“I don’t think that’s what happened either, actually.”

La Rosa, whose family had aided the Gorgon more than once over the generations, felt more than a missing limb at her absence.

“Then if she’s dead and she didn’t die from having her baby, what killed her?”

La Rosa rested his chin in his hands and kept looking at Mazzei, eyes darkening.

“Your man killed her.”

“Now _wait—“_

“She was an island. She wasn’t going to go anywhere. _We_ would never stop thinking of her, no matter where she lived. When the peninsula unified, Naples was no longer its own state, and when she told Naples she was pregnant he probably realized the baby was going to take her territory. So he killed her, and he killed the baby.”

“They can’t die—“

La Rosa’s bottom lip had begun to tremble, the rest of him holding perfectly still. He had practiced silence far too well.

“ _Clearly_ they can. I don’t know how. Drowned her, poisoned her, broke her neck, but both of them are dead and it’s his fault.”

Mazzei shook his head.

“Naples wouldn’t kill his _wife_.”

“My great-great-grandfather was one of the men who hid Sicily when she escaped her execution by the Spanish, and my grandfather served under her during the war against the Austrians,” La Rosa responded. “She was strong. My grandfather wouldn’t stop talking about how strong she was. She couldn’t have died from something as common as _childbirth._ Women give birth every day. It’s too easy.”

As anyone does when confronted with a theory that sounded plausible but did not exist in harmony with their idea of the world, Mazzei got very distressed. He refused to allow for something as cut and dry as historical fact to best him, however.

“They wouldn’t teach it in all our schools if it didn’t have some sort of truth to it.”

La Rosa’s eyes rolled, the flash of white being visible from several feet away.

“When was the last time you went to school?” Mendola countered on La Rosa’s behalf. “How do you know they still teach that?”

Mazzei faltered.

“You never even went to school, did you?”

“Did you?”

“Do you think my father made enough money in Catania to send me to school?” Mendola scoffed. “There was work to be done.”

There was a shuffling sound about ten meters from where they were sitting; the group followed the path their goosebumps left to see Sardinia standing just outside of the halo of rocks where they had congregated.

“Hello, sir.”

“Evening, gentlemen.”

The Sardinians straightened their backs; the others kept theirs curved, but felt bad about it.

“Can we help you?”

“Yes,” Sardinia nodded. “Get back to work and shut the fuck up. Much will happen tomorrow.”

“Sardinia?”

“Is this question going to be about what you were just discussing ever so loudly?”

“Yes.”

“I might answer.”

“Which is true? Is the Gorgon alive or dead?”

Sardinia loomed over Private Mendola, the thick smell of alcohol on his breath.

“She is dead.”

Mendola was starting to sweat, but asked his question nonetheless:

“Is that answer the truth?”

“It doesn’t matter; it’s _my_ answer. Do you think I would lie to you about my family dying?”

“No, sir.”

“Good, then you’ve learned at least one thing since you’ve come here.”

~~

Ivan certainly didn’t remember his chest being turned from solid into a sieve, but war was never a situation in which one recalled things perfectly.

As was common for him when he was injured, it was difficult for him to push his first, comfortable language back down into his gut and use Russian.

“What happened?”

“You and your crew were attacked. You were the only one that survived.”

Somehow being the patient instead of the doctor had made Ivan more aware of the people groaning next to him.

“How bad is it?” he asked, wincing as the adhesive pulled back and took his chest hair along for the ride. The other medic at the foot of his bed hadn’t been able to stop him in time before he saw the pulsating mess of blood and tissue that had once been his left pectoral muscle.

He leaned back, silent, against the one thin pillow they were able to afford him. Someone handed him a canteen of water, which was perhaps the most useful thing anyone on staff had done for him since he’d regained consciousness.

“How long was I out?”

“You were conscious when you arrived here about eight hours ago.” The doctor paused, gaze slicing up from the floor to meet the nation in his hospital bed.

“You were howling in tongues.”

“Oh?” Ivan felt a bead of sweat drip into his reopened wound and kept himself from wincing.

“Rabinovich was able to understand you at intervals, but he’s since fallen asleep. Would you like for me to wake him?”

“No, no. That’s quite alright.”

“I can redress your—“

“No. That will heal on its own. It needs air. I will be better by the time I see you again.”

“Must be nice.”

“At times.” Ivan decided not to mention how there were times where he wished a bullet would find some sort of gland or nerve cluster that would send him to hell for good.

The good doctor nodded curtly and saw himself off to deal with patients who were having more issues with their healing capacities. Ivan sat alone in the dark for roughly two minutes before Rabinovich began to stir.

“Rabinovich? Are you awake?”

Rabinovich stopped moving.

“Rabinovich?”

No response. Ivan decided to take the chance to switch methods.

“Rabinovich? _Bistu aoyf?_ ”

Rabinovich sighed.

“ _Yo, ir shreklekh zun fun a hur, ikh bin vakh._ ”

Ivan’s laugh turned into a harsh cough that made his wounds quake unpleasantly.

“What the hell did I say when I was raving?” he queried, maintaining Yiddish while still in pain.

“You were praying. It was awful.”

“What?”

“You were calling out to the old gods in Yiddish. It was completely incoherent. I was convinced it was a dream until the doctor came in and said otherwise.”

Rabinovich wasn’t telling the entire truth, but Ivan was under the impression that he didn’t want the whole truth anyhow. He tried to remember which Rabinovich the Rabinovich he was speaking to was.

“Aren’t you an only child?”

“Yes.”

_Right. There we go._

“I’ve never been around this many men my age before, especially living. There’s not a lot of privacy. Can’t do a lot of the things I used to without being afraid of someone listening to me.”

Ivan knew privacy could be many things, but decided to delve in on the definition that was the most character defining.

“If you dare, there are some interesting photographs in Lieutenant Mikhailov’s pillowcase, and there’s an area in the southwest of main camp where very few people patrol.”

Rabinovich looked mortified but Ivan could tell he was committing this advice to memory nonetheless.

“How would _you_ know?”

Ivan snorted against his better judgment.

“What do you think I do in my fleeting spare time? Do you think I go back to my bunk and embroider?”

Rabinovich started laughing in spite of himself.

“Do they know you’ve done that?”

“Who will stop me? What will they do, relieve me of my post?”

“They’d stop _me._ ”

“You’d be surprised at how much people keep busy with themselves, Rabinovich.”

“In more ways than one, if you’re telling the truth.”

Now Ivan started laughing, loud enough that a nurse came in to ask what was the matter and to fuss over the blood he had spilled on the sheets. The wound had grown skin over it but was still regenerating flesh, meaning that instead of being full of holes Ivan was now cratered like the surface of the moon. Faster than usual.

“Laughter’s the best medicine.”

The nurse stared at him blankly. Rabinovich, at this point, was pretending to be asleep again so she wouldn’t take it upon herself to start doing more than she ought to for his cold.

“Nothing. No need to fuss over me. Go tend to someone else, I’m fine.”

~~

_It was before the birth of Christ. Corsica, Sardinia, and Sicily were territories of Rome, forced to work in his household._

_It had been years since Carthage’s fall and Phoenicia’s occupation that Sicily came sneaking into the back shed with a bundle in her arms, laying the quiet cargo out for her cousins to see._

_“This is—“_

_“Yes, this is Malta,” she responded to Sardinia, her work-worn hands tracing the baby’s soft torso. “He can crawl now.”_

_Malta grabbed onto Corsica’s finger and did not let go._

_“I thought he was sent away with his mother.”_

_“I don’t know what happened to her, but I found him washed up on the shore back when I ran away a few months ago. I’ve had him hidden inside of that hollow tree on the outskirts of town. If Romulus finds him, he will kill him. He sacked Carthage looking for him, I don’t know why he wouldn’t stop now.”_

_“Welcome back, little cousin,” Sardinia whispered, gently playing with Malta’s downy black hair._

_Sicily’s eyes closed._

_“He’ll be above all of this. None of what we’ve seen or been done to us will touch him.”_

~~

Istanbul is a city within which one could sign away parts of themselves in the morning and then find them for half off in a pawn shop window in the evening. Salvatore was having a very difficult time not referring to it as Constantinople, sitting on a park bench and waiting for the man who would undoubtedly either collaborate with him or murder him on the spot.

So Salvatore waited, poring over the letter that Sardinia had sent him, looking for the point. There reaches a point in every young man’s life where they realize that those elders who held such power, such wisdom over them were mostly improvising.

There was still no word about Jett; he assumed if there’d been a development he would have been told about it, or would have started receiving body parts in the mail by now.

 _“You’ll be meeting with the informant,_ ” Arthur had said over the telephone.

_“Why me? Why not a non-nation? Why make me travel all that way?”_

They both knew why. Salvatore still felt the holster of his pistol digging into his ribs and his knife trying to burst out from his pant leg.

Guns still felt foreign to him, but unfortunately it was no longer socially acceptable to walk around day by day with a sword strapped to your back.

His mouth was beginning to feel dry. Did Sadik know he was here? Did Sadik know anything of political life and affairs at this point other than to play mind games and hope for the best?

Salvatore knew the answer to that question but refused to answer it out of begrudging respect for his elders.

A man in the suit sat next to him and lit a cigarette before turning to get a look at Salvatore’s wide, stern face.

“Hello,” he began in English before getting a better look at Salvatore. “Would you prefer Arabic?”

“English is fine.” Salvatore was not ready to admit that he’d almost completely forgotten his mother’s tongue.

“Very well. Do you have what I asked for?”

“Of course,” Salvatore supplied, glancing around for anyone particularly regarding the two of them. “Your payment is in this case. I will leave it with you when I take the documents you’ve supplied.”

The spy nodded, taking another drag from his cigarette.

“I apologize, I should have offered you one.”

“No, thank you; I don’t smoke.”

“You ought to start,” the spy said with a faint smile.

“So I’ve heard. May you please give me what you have so we can both be on our merry way and avoid getting shot?”

“Here.”

The papers felt heavy in Salvatore’s hands. Numbers, plans, figures. All things Salvatore was not expected to understand but was required to embody.

“Thank you for your service, sir.”

The spy got up and took his briefcase full of money.

“Any time. You know something?”

Salvatore put his hands in his overcoat pockets.

“You are much younger looking than I was expecting.”

Salvatore’s face hinted a smile.

“I don’t get that often. Thank you.”

~~

Feliciano had never been a mountain man; that had been Simone’s forte and he’d left the alpine environment to his jurisdiction as a result. When Simone died, Feliciano had not even bothered to visit the territory that he consequentially embodied.

Feliciano had been trying not to think of Simone since being stationed in the mountains and had been failing every moment; the droop in his shoulders turned to a droop in morale, and therefore a droop in success. This upset their superiors, who insisted that it was imperative that Feliciano stop having feelings.

But he, as an artist and as a stubborn jackass, would not let himself be deterred in that regard.

Antine, consistently a logician and a strategist before a romantic, did not have the same sense of duty towards his personal losses.

That was probably why they were being split up.

“Feliciano,” Antine began, tone as even as he could make it without giving away both how excited he was at being relieved of his post with the non-Sardinian recruits to go back to his “devils” and how concerned he was at the prospect of Feliciano conducting a front of the land war by himself, “what’s going on?”

Feliciano thought of the many decades between this moment and the moment when he’d found Simone lying dead in his Milan apartment, three days rotted with a bullet wound in the back of his skull, and shook his head. He needed to let Simone rest. He needed to not let Antine know Simone lurked in the back of his skull like so many others who had left him behind.

“Nothing.”

Sardinia spared a moment to remember his attempt at suicide, how quiet the water had been around his ears before he’d been pulled up to air, back to life.

“Let me know if there’s anything I can help you with. I leave tomorrow. You can always write me.”

Feliciano let out an uncharacteristically brutish grunt before Antine left him to his own devices.

~~

Lovino hadn’t been told he was going to be sent to aid their allies until about three days before they sent him to a military hospital stationed in Belgium. He was told to gather his belongings, kiss the sunlight goodbye, and that his service would be an excellent way to sweeten the pot for their already precarious position amongst the Alliance. He didn’t understand, but he assumed the idea was not that he understood but that he obeyed. He’d been doing this long enough that he knew monarchs disliked being asked too many questions.

He still hadn’t gotten used to the faces coming into the hospital. Or the burns, for that matter. He hadn’t expected to be treating this many burns.

In fact, he hadn’t been focused on this kind of medicine at all. He’d never seen wounds this severe before, or bodies as irreparably shattered.

He also hadn’t been expecting to see anyone he knew amongst the wounded or dying, surprising himself with how quickly he recognized an old friend through the bloody pulp that had become of his face. He recognized the matted, curly red hair before the man’s face could get the energy to knit itself back together again.

“Caoimhean?”

Half of a green eye widened in surprise.

“Don’t talk, you’ll reopen your—“

Lovino made a wide sweeping gesture to the remainder of Caoimhean’s body.

~~

_Lovino did not like whenever Alfred came to visit, mostly because he didn’t like the idea of Alfred seeing someone so much older and so much more culturally important sleeping on the hard ground with four other people and sharing a bathroom with forty. When Lovino came to visit him, he could present himself as he pleased: he could sew up the holes in his suit and bring a bottle of wine in a fancy bottle that he’d saved, knowing that Alfred wouldn’t be able to taste the difference between good wine and whatever Lovino had been making under the kitchen sink._

_Caoimhean, as the only person who lived in the apartment who actually didn’t mind talking to Lovino, was watching Lovino wipe the five-fold accumulation of grime on the floor. Mediterranean hospitality only goes so far when you aren’t the only one who owns your living space._

_“Are you quite done?”_

_Lovino shook his head._

_“I haven’t done this in years—“_

_Caoimhean sighed before grabbing a rag of his own._

_“Have you been able to find a job yet?” As Lovino’s English got better, Caoimhean’s accent became more decipherable._

_“Mm, nothing steady.”_

_“Me neither.”_

_Caoimhean looked sidelong at Lovino, whose dark eyes inched along the grain of the wood reappearing from underneath the layers of dirt._

_“Your lady fair keeps appearing to me in the windows.”_

_Lovino laughed._

_“You too? Here I was, thinking I was special with how her name greeted me at all the local shops.”_

_Her memory grew heavy around his temples like moss on a forest floor before he finally grasped at something else to ask Caoimhean about, before the current subject grew thick enough to choke him._

_“And you? How are you feeling? Where’s your Turkish prince?”_

_Caoimhean coughed into his sleeve, not ceasing his scrubbing. He’d been doing this longer than Lovino had been._

_“Sadik sent a ship of food to my people. It helped stave off the pangs a bit.”_

_“One ship?”_

_“He wrote a letter saying he wanted to send one hundred, but the Queen would not allow it. If he sent one hundred, it would rival what she had sent in aid.”_

_Lovino scrubbed in silence for about five seconds._

_“He really loves you.”_

_“Yes, he does.”_

~~

Caoimhean had been kind enough to knit together enough of his face to talk to Lovino while he sewed together what Caoimhean hadn’t had the energy to regenerate.

“Do you sleep in the hospital or do you sleep in the trenches?”

“Depends on where I’m needed, but usually here when I’m allowed to.”

“ _Allowed_ to? How do you stay awake?”

“The coffee’s rationed for the soldiers so we can have the rest,” Lovino said with a wink, turning to change his gloves again before continuing on Caoimhean’s sutures.

“Is that really necessary—“

“You, like anyone else, will heal faster when you have something holding your skin shut.”

Caoimhean groaned and Lovino hesitated.

“It’s not that bad, is it?”

“Nah, just need to whine about it for a moment. Know what I mean?”

Lovino nodded before going back to work.

~~

_Alfred stopped to stare at one of the few pictures hanging from a rusty nail on the wall. Her eyes stared out blankly from behind the glass._

_“Who is this?”_

_Caoimhean glanced down furtively. Lovino tried to be as offhand about it as possible._

_“That’s my wife. She’s back home in Italy.”_

_“She’s beautiful.”_

_Lovino nodded._

_“She is.”_

~~

Erzsi was gone, summoned to her husband’s side before Gilbert had the chance to say goodbye to her, and Ludwig was somewhere out west where Gilbert couldn’t see but could sense, which just made him more concerned for Ludwig’s well-being.

Gilbert was alone.

Gilbert was used to that, but did not enjoy it much.

His body quaked before he was racked with a coughing fit, doubling over in his cot and choking on his own blood-tainted saliva. He had been losing weight faster than before, shriveling in his uniform until he felt that it was threatening to drown him if the weight of everything else on his chest and shoulders didn’t kill him first.

Roderich had gout, the letter from Erzsi had explained. That meant that the Italians were going to be making their sallies from the Alps.

Gilbert wondered what it meant if Austria was still having residual pains over northern Italy when it had been liberated so long ago.

He tried to remember if Roderich had begun shrinking as Ludwig had begun to grow. .He was drawing a blank; he hadn’t seen Roderich in the flesh in years. Even on his occasional allowances to go back to the home front for morale, Roderich refused to see him.

Gilbert wouldn’t want to look at him, either. No hard feelings.

~~

 _China su fronte_  
si ses sezzidu pesa!  
ch'es passende  
sa Brigata tattaresa  
boh! boh!  
e cun sa manu sinna  
sa mezzus gioventude  
de Saldigna

Sardinia had never been allowed to be proud of his people until right about…..now. His chest began to widen and his face began to contort into his smile, that one smile that Romans wrote about in fear and confusion.

He was marching. They were moving. They trusted him to do right by the world, the crazy bastards.

He loved them fiercely. __  
  
Semus istiga  
de cudd’antica zente  
ch’à s’innimigu  
frimmaiat su coro  
boh! Boh!  
es nostra oe s’insigna  
pro s’onore de s’Italia  
e de Saldigna

 _  
_ Sardinia could practically smell the anxiety pumping through Roderich’s veins; he didn’t care how many times he’d have to be beaten back before getting his way. The important part was that he get it in the first place, and before others could intervene.

 __  
Dae sa trincea  
finas' a sa Croazia  
sos "Tattarinos"  
han'iscrittu s'istoria  
boh! boh!  
sighimos cuss'olmina  
onorende cudd'erenzia  
tattarina  
  


_“It’s important to me that all of the men in this squadron be recruited locally,” Antine had said, tapping the name on the paper impatiently. “What’s the point of a Sassari brigade if nobody there is from Sassari?”_

__  
Ruiu su coro  
e s'animu che lizzu  
cussos colores  
adornant s'istendarde  
boh! boh!  
e fortes che nuraghe  
a s'attenta pro mantenere  
sa paghe  
  


Sardinia felt the rush of every man beside him and knew every name and township they derived from. He felt older than old in the dark, all-covering eyeglasses replaced with a pair of fitted aviator goggles. He’d first heard the term “devil squadron” in a British newspaper. It had made his tongue swell itself into stunned, enthralled silence.

 __  
Sa fide nostra  
no la pagat dinari  
ajò! dimonios!  
avanti forza paris. 

 

He drove a knife into the eye of a foreigner and knew that the last thing he would see was Antine’s glass-covered eyes, glowing compound in the moonlight.

~~

It was two weeks after Ivan’s tissue had fully regenerated. Two and a half since Rabinovich had been discharged from the hospital. Two hours since Rabinovich had been rushed back with shrapnel embedded into his face and throat. Ivan closed Rabinovich’s unseeing eyes on the operating table and groaned silently to himself that his people died too quickly and too cheaply in comparison to everywhere else. The cold sweat prickling at the small of his back and at the center of his chest let him know that he had been focusing too much on his work here and not enough on what he had left to his fearless commander.

_Nicholas is going to abdicate. The talk has been true._

He scratched at the patchy mustache he had allowed himself to grow out of negligence rather than in keeping any sort of fashion.

_“Fuck!”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I know, I know. I made this one longer to make up for the gap. Grad school applications really threw me through a loop. 
> 
> Thank you to everyone who reads this. Idk why y'all do it, but I hope you're having fun.


	10. Fate

_“Ahumm, I want you to hold still.”_

_Young Corsica had never been terribly adept at that._

_“If I make a mistake because you keep wriggling, it will not work and I will have to start all over,” wheedled his mother. He relented, sucking on the bit of wood she had given him to bite. She continued to tap the ink into his skin._

_“How many of these does Uncle have?”_

_“More than I have ever cared to count; he has someone else draw his.”_

_Corsica’s wrist was burning._

_“What will mine do?”_

_“The one I’m doing now is for courage. The second will be for protection. And the third…well, it’s for convenience.”_

_“Convenience?”_

_Phoenicia shook her head, focusing back on her tattoo work._

_“You’ll see. Don’t worry.”_

_~~_

No article about the front that Andria ever read in the newspapers captured the smell quite right. They mentioned the mud, or the alcohol, or the smell of rotting flesh. They never mentioned how all three curled their way into your nostrils and made you gag for the first three days. Death was never meant to hang so heavily on men’s shoulders, but men have always known how to make do.

When he heard the planes flying overhead it made the protective sigils carved into his skin begin to burn.

“Did you hear about the Devil squadron making a move?” one _poilu_ asked him. Corsica grinned wolfishly.

“Sure did. The only Italians you should ever be scared of are the ones that come off of the islands.”

Was he referencing himself as well? He didn’t quite know where he stood anymore in that regard. He knew from letters that Antine had tried desperately to reunite the two of them.

Sometimes he wondered how desperately Antine was trying, in the end, if they had been so far apart while being only a few miles away for over a century.

His skin wouldn’t stop burning and he pulled up his sleeve to look at the marks. The sigil was raised and puffy. His heart began to beat a bit faster. What was going to happen to make a protection marking flip into overdrive now of all days, if it was so silent all these prior years? _Keep on the lookout._

~~

_Gilbert was pacing in his study, carrying on in some older form of Ludwig’s mother tongue that he could not understand. An envoy from Austria had given him some sort of letter that Ludwig was not allowed to see. A much, much younger Ludwig knocked on his door._

_“Is there something wrong?”_

_Gilbert stopped and grinned._

_“Don’t worry about me. I always have an answer. And if I don’t, I know people who do.”_

_Ludwig nodded._

_“If you don’t know what to do, always look for people around who might help you.”_

_Ludwig nodded again._

~~

Ludwig was out of options. Ludwig had never been out of options before. He sat, alone, staring at his map, thinking of the possibility of yet another adversary.

_Always look for people around who might help you._

He looked at his map again.

_Look for people around who might help you._

It was worth a shot.

~~

Arthur had been summoned into a briefing within which he, for the first time in many years, had no idea what the subject was.

He was presented with a decoded telegram.

“… _Mexico?_ ”

“Yes.”

“Someone _must_ be stupid,” one official snorted, then fiddled with his cuff buttons.

Arthur shook his head.

“No, he’s not stupid. Just very, _very_ desperate. Has Alfred received this yet?”

“Not that we know of.”

“You will alert me if you receive any sort of word from the United States. In the meantime, we stand by. I highly doubt Mexico will take him up on his offer.”

“Agreed.”

~~

_ARTHUR_

_MEXICO SENT ME A MESSAGE STOP SOMETHING ABOUT GERMANY ASKING FOR AN ALLIANCE AGAINST ME STOP JUST THOUGHT YOU SHOULD KNOW STOP_

Arthur, being one to always fight back the urge to tell people he knew more than they ever thought he did, spent about ten minutes crafting a response that would seem both supportive and nonchalant.

_ALFRED_

_LET ME KNOW WHAT COURSE OF ACTION YOU INTEND TO TAKE STOP I WILL NOT THINK LESS OF YOU NO MATTER WHAT YOU CHOOSE STOP THIS IS UP TO YOU TO DECIDE STOP_

Arthur could imagine Alfred’s white teeth digging into his bottom lip, desperately trying to break his habit of biting his nails. Inevitably, Alfred would get anxious enough to start at his thumb, then his middle finger, then his ring finger, his index finger, and finish his pinky until all ten were bloody stumps. All it took was a mild inconvenience for him to start on the first course.

Surely, Alfred would ruminate. People were often surprised at how long it took him to decide about anything important, given that he was also the boy who seemed the least inclined to grow out of his childhood impulses by the time he reached adulthood.

~~

Lovino was more than happy to take someone with an itch over someone with a missing face.

“What’s ailing you, Andria?”

“I just need some kind of anti-itching something to put on these.”

Lovino glanced down at the ugly rash breaking out over Andria’s wrists.

“Jesus. No worries, I can get that for you.”

“Thanks.”

“Do those things still work?” Lovino rummaged through the first aid kit for the collection of creams. Andria shifted in his seat.

“What, my sigils?”

“Yes.” _What else, you lummox?_

“The first two ones seem to be working fine, since I haven’t run away nor have I died yet.” Andria fumbled with a canteen of purified water.

“And the third?”

“The third is convenient to the point of uselessness. I spilled wine as a cupbearer in my uncle’s ceremonies a few too many times, so she made this sigil so I can’t spill any liquids when using a vessel with this hand.”

“What?”

“Look.”

Andria flipped his full canteen spout-down. Not a drop of it left the opening.

“See what I mean?”

Lovino stood watching it, unsure of what to comment.

“Can you even drink anything using that hand?”

“If I tilt my hand slowly enough.”

“Want me to switch hands?”

“Not particularly.” Lovino started to apply the lotion to Andria’s skin. He smelled burning flesh as he got closer to the sores.

“Are you sure that it’s only a result of the sigils?”

Andria nodded.

“Mustard gas wouldn’t do this kind of thing to me.”

“Keep them wrapped up. Reapply this three times a day. No more, no less. If it starts to itch more, that means that it’s working.”

“Or it means we’re in deep shit.”

“That too, but that’s not something we have control over.”

~~

_Why am I back here?_

The dark looks on his people’s faces were too much for him to bear. Was he that unrecognizable? He was shaved now, in civilian clothes, back on the home front as the Tsar abdicated from the throne and left perhaps the world’s loudest silence in his place.

_I should visit my sisters._

Would they still want to see him? Did anybody want to see him in the first place? He could still smell the frightened sweat on Serbia’s upper lip from that stupid, _stupid_ day three years ago.

~~

“We’re running out of ammunition,” one soldier had breathed to another. Andria had pretended that he hadn’t heard, but the sigils on his wrists were threatening to burst free of his skin with how hard they were working and he felt like maybe it was a proper time to take action.

Have you ever crawled over a barricade of dead bodies? He would never recommend that course of action to anyone.

_Do any of these dead men have bullets we can use?_

Cigarettes. Andria didn’t smoke, but he could always start. Andria’s helmet hung heavy over his thick browbone, pushing hollow on his freshly shaved head. He had never missed his hair more than when the shots rang and he had nothing covering his ears. He pulled it off absently when it fell over his eyes, squinting in the darkness to get a better look at what all he had looted.

He was surprised that it seemed nobody had seen him—

_Bang._

He spoke too soon. The bullet glanced off of a dead man’s helmet.

~~

“Corsica! Corsica! Get back!” Francis felt his voice shrink against the harshness of his throat, rubbed raw with fumes and over-usage. Arthur scuttled from his position to examine the commotion.

“What’s he doing?”

“Corsica!”

Arthur’s voice cut winter-sharp through the air.

_“ANDRIA! GET DOWN!”_

~~

Andria was shaking his head, ignoring the hail of bullets that kept conveniently skirting around him.

_“ANDRIA! GET DOWN!”_

The bullet kissed the base of his skull and Andria felt his response of _it’s fine_ die in his throat. As it exited through his right eye he could swear he felt the world spinning underneath him.

He could never get the hang of staying safe on dry land.

~~

_Sardinia,_

_You have been summoned to one of the Allied fronts in Belgium. The French officer I spoke to made it clear that it was something urgent which required your immediate attention. Stress was put on the fact that you were needed as an individual rather than as your position. For your protection, your destination will not be written lest it be intercepted. Your escorts will be instructed on where to take you. You will have to leave your project with the radiomen on hold and leave as soon as possible._

_Good luck._

Antine felt something spinning in the bottom of his stomach. He ripped the note in half before beginning to fold up his tattered uniform and the piecemeal belongings that he’d managed to maintain while in the mountains. Everything else had fallen off of cliffs or had been shot full of holes.

He didn’t know how much longer they could hold out.

He did not know what he was expecting, either, when he finally arrived under the cover of several nights in Belgium. Four French officers were standing at solemn attention.

_Something is very wrong._

His French was nonexistent, as it always had been, and he waited awkwardly until an Anglophone was present while trying to keep from thinking too hard about what kind of situation had to have transpired to require him to leave his post in top secrecy to end up at a military hospital.

It was only fitting that Arthur would arrive ten minutes later than usual when it felt like the universe needed him most. Arthur did not smile at him.

“Walk with me.”

_It’s Andria, isn’t it?_

Antine remained silent and did what he was told. A rarity.

“What’s going on?”

Arthur took a sharp turn to the left, causing Antine to nearly fall over him. His knees began to knock gently against each other while he tried to hide the fact that he was shaking.

“I have a right to know.”

“Indeed you do,” Arthur opened a door, which revealed a flight of stairs. “What do you know about your people’s magic?”

“My mother was a practitioner. I know very little else. Corsica is the one who watched her during rituals. I think he knows some.”

Arthur nodded and kept walking.

“I’m surprised he never showed you anything. I think he’s the only one out of all four of us who got any kind of magical anything.”

“Your brother Adão has some promise. I’m still unsure what it was about Romulus and Helena that made their descendants so utterly dull when it comes to any type of magical capabilities.”

“He’s dead, isn’t he.”

Arthur seemed to be waiting for him to add more details to his statement.

“My brother, I mean.”

Arthur opened another door and Antine could see the glow of votive candles and smell their wax melting onto a dirt floor.

“See for yourself.”

Antine took two steps towards the door. A gust of antiseptic and burning flesh hit his face. He took two more steps and made his way to the center of the room. What was left of Andria was lying on his back. If it had not been for Andria’s tattoos, Antine would not have been able to recognize him. There was nothing left of his face, only a perfect oval of a sore singed shut. The burnt wound barely covered the bone. His eye sockets were completely empty.

“Is he conscious?”

“I would hope not.”

Antine moved two strands of hair off of what would have been Andria’s forehead. It would be a tender gesture if he hadn’t been fighting back the bile rising and middling right in his chest.

“Is he alive?”

“Barely.”

“Who did this to him?”

“Don’t know—”

“Yes, you surely do. Don’t lie to me. He’s a nation. They don’t just let us _slip away_ to lose our faces whenever we please.”

“Allegedly, he overheard someone mention that we were low on ammunition. He climbed up over the fortifications to start stealing the bullets off of dead soldiers. Someone shot him and the bullet exited out of his face, taking the skin and much of the muscle with it. I saw him try to crawl away before he seemed to lose consciousness. That’s when he got tangled in the barbed wire.”

Antine looked down to see the mangled remains of Andria’s left hand and forearm. The bone was exposed, shining white hot in the candlelight.

“I asked about his magic because a few of his sigils are so powerful that they’re protecting him from any kind of healing attempt I make. Did he tattoo them himself?”

“Which ones?” Antine remembered all the sigils Andria had dutifully drilled into his own skin when he thought nobody was looking. Many of them were now hidden behind drawings of birds and beautiful women. He wondered if they still worked when nobody else could see that they were there.

Arthur lifted Andria’s remaining wrist to show Antine two symbols, which were still raised and sore.

“No, not those. Those are our mother’s.”

“Do you know any way to counteract them?”

“The only man who could tell you for certain is the one at our feet.”

“None of your texts survived?”

“There was a genocide, Arthur. The Romans burned anything of our culture that they could get their hands on. If they couldn’t burn it, they made it illegal.”

Antine didn’t have the energy to say that certainly Arthur, of all people, would know plenty about that sort of thing.

The uncomfortable silence stretched for miles. Antine just wanted to find his twin brother at the end of it.

~~

_I am requesting a leave of absence STOP I must make a brief return home and a trip to Ajaccio to look for something STOP It is a very time sensitive and urgent family emergency STOP I apologize for the inconvenience STOP_

_You are granted two weeks of leave STOP My thoughts are with you STOP_

~~

Mrs. Tekin had been running her store for about 50 years now. For roughly 30 of these 50 years she’d had a special visitor who came in on Sundays and always bought three things: a bottle of milk, half a vine of tomatoes, and a large container of _dolma._ Sometimes she made her _dolma_ with just rice or with meat added in. He never asked which recipe she used, and she never saw him spit any of them out in disgust, so she assumed that he was enjoying them regardless of their inconsistency.

She had never thought to ask what made him come into her store as opposed to any of the others lining the street; after all this time, she could not tell where exactly in Istanbul he lived. Every time he came in and asked for the aforementioned outrageous quantity of _dolma_ she would ask if he was going to share it with anyone in particular. He would shake his head plainly, grab his three things, walk out and chatter to the cats lining the sidewalks, and then he would be gone.

Mrs. Tekin did not even know this young man’s name. And how young was he, in the end, if he had stayed so dashing over these past 30 years? She could not recall him ever looking any older; she also could not recall him looking any younger, for that matter.

Her special customer walked in smelling how the late Mr. Tekin had about two weeks before his body gave in and he had left her behind.

“You look sick, my boy.”

He smiled thinly, wiping sweat away from the bags that had developed under his eyes.

“And, I truly am sorry, I think I’ve forgotten your name.”

“Sadik.”

“Oh, what a lovely name. I have a nephew named Sadik.”

Sadik had to fight back the impulse to say _I know you do._

“The same as always?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Are you sure you wouldn’t want some coffee?”

“No, thank you. I’m in a bit of a rush.”

She gave him the milk, the tomatoes, and the _dolma_ as she had been doing for decades. He left, and she went back to the rest of her life.

Sadik never knew what he was supposed to do when looking at the Hagia Sophia; was he supposed to marvel at all that he had added to it, or grieve all the ways that it reminded him less and less of Helena?

There was a saucer embedded in a jut of stone about three hundred yards from the stairs of the mosque. He filled it with half the milk and drank the rest. As the cats filtered in, one by one, he greeted them by name.

_There, Helena. Your cats are fed for the Sabbath._

He didn’t know if that had actually been her dying wish; all he knew was that it kept her dead body from appearing in his dreams.

~~

Alfred stood in front of a hall mirror. Night again. For someone who’d supported isolationism, he’d certainly been following the war in Europe closely. He’d been too comfortable in silence, he decided. Too comfortable in complicity. He knew then that his country needed to grow, and then he realized that growth could not be maintained in a vacuum. God, how much blood was going to be spilled before he could be moved? When would the amber melt and let the insects inside crawl free? It was time.

~~

On April 6, 1917, roughly six months after the interception and deciphering of the Zimmerman Telegraph by the English, the United States declared war on Germany. Alfred F. Jones went with the first flock of soldiers. He expected to stay there as long as the universe allowed.


	11. Locum

_Malta stood naked in an iron tub while his older sister washed him with a sponge. He must have been no older than seven. He was missing two of his front teeth, and his wide nose was sprayed with freckles. The family resemblance between the two of them was the closest that it had ever been, and the closest that it ever would be._

_“There was a waterfall, and then there were trees, and I’ve never seen so much—“_

_“You need to stay close to me, Sasà.”_

_“But—“_

_“You can’t keep running off like that. Not anymore.”_

_The water in the tub began to lose its glow as it absorbed more of the grime. She continued to wash him. She was not smiling. He couldn’t tell if she was truly upset or if she was repressing a smile to make a point. Either way, the effect of it was devastating._

_“There are people out there who want to take you away from me, Salvatore. If they get ahold of you then you’ll never climb for waterfalls and hunt mushrooms in the forest ever again. You and I can’t let that happen.”_

_Salvatore was too young to know fully everything he was supposed to represent, both as a landmass and as a continuation of something far greater._

_“If they’re in those woods, then why haven’t I met them yet?”_

_Serafina squeezed out the sponge. She broke eye contact and looked at his bloody fingernails. He had been climbing rocks and found the adventure of it more important than how his appearance reflected on her abilities as his caretaker._

_“Because so far, you’ve been very lucky. It’s only me who can watch over you the way you need to be watched over.”_

_He squinted at her. Her mouth finally eased itself into a smile._

_“If you want things to go exactly the way you want them to, you have to do them yourself.”_

_She dumped a cupful of water over Salvatore’s head._

_~~_

Jett was sleeping fitfully and Malta could smell it on the breeze.

Salvatore’s eyes were thick and bloodshot, having spent all night following some vapor of intuition and personal affinity for retrieval.

He walked. And he walked. And he walked some more. And just as he felt his calf could not spasm more, he took another step. His cane had snapped a week or two ago, (he had thrown it into a field to test the ground for land-mines; he had proven that they were not to cross the field, but his poor cane had been the sole casualty) and he used a discarded umbrella as a replacement. His steps, fast and uneven on the dirt, spoke to people in iambic pentameter:

_Get OUT of The WAY, Get OUT of The WAY, Get OUT of The WAY…._

Locals knew he was a foreigner from the way he was dressed and the way he so rudely refused to speak to any of them as he walked by, but given that he was twice as wide as their village’s largest donkey and he was three times as frightening made them take the song his shoes were singing into account more than others may have.

Salvatore St. John was out for blood. He had filed the tip of the umbrella into a point. Unlike his sister and uncles, he had far fewer qualms with violating the First Commandment so long as he felt God was on his side about such a decision.

It seemed all too fortunate to him that God was on his side when he rammed the sharp end of his cane into the guard’s jugular. And another. And another still. He saw their bodies slump downwards and heard their chattering souls groan out from between their teeth. He wondered for a quarter of a moment where they were going to go before he moved on down the corridor.

He wiped the tip off on his frayed shirtsleeve. When it was satisfactorily clean, he planted it back in the dirt and continued on his way. The only thing that might be more relentless than him was the passage of time.

Grey dust ground itself into his molars after three minutes of breathing with his mouth open. He’d begun to sweat on the way; the thick uniforms they had been given were not made for such a climate, and he left droplets in his wake moreso than footprints.

Salvatore could smell the sweat, fear and blood on each prisoner. He could hear them gagging on their own adrenaline. He thought about letting them all choke on it. Could a heart stop from suspense alone?

He wondered if they thought he was here to save them or murder them.

He could feel Jett in capital letters at the end of the hallway; he continued to advance, ignoring the heat that curled itself into the crescent of missing flesh in his calf.

His steps left their relentless echo painted in the beatless eardrums of the soldiers Salvatore had left at the doorway.

_Get OUT of The WAY, Get OUT of The WAY, Get OUT of The WAY_

~~

Sadik awoke to the sound of Sabir barking. How she’d managed to run from the foot of his cot to the edge of the camp without waking him remained unclear.

His nose was hit with the smell of salt and iron. It had been a long time, but he would know him from anywhere.

What’s the difference between Sadik Adnan and a loaded rifle? A rifle has to be reloaded to be deadly more than once.

Sadik was ready to throttle the brat with his bare hands, but took his aging pistol with him instead. Never hurt to be cautious.

Sabir had yet to stop barking; thick ropes of saliva had begun to leap from her jowls.

The wind shifted, blowing a notification of his presence into her own nose, and she turned to look at Sadik. He walked onwards, and she followed close at his heels. They had been doing this for quite some time.

~~

Jett had been sleeping lightly for most of the night, unable to rest comfortably with yet another broken face that refused to mend. He couldn’t understand why he would not bring himself to open his eyes when the door burst open.

There was shouting, whooping, and hissing from outside. The room was filled with the smell of dried blood and some kind of righteous fury that was associated only with those who refused to ever consider that they could be a villain.

Jett opened one eye. And another.

“Get up.”

He complied. How could he do otherwise?

Jett could feel his ribs pressing against his shirt, reaching out for the muscle that used to cover them.

“We’re leaving.”

“Yes, sir.” Jett could remember when Salvatore had first arrived to London, thin, shivering and itching at the wool suit that had been provided for him. None of that child seemed to have survived.

“Can you walk?”

“Yes.” Jett didn’t know if he was allowed to say anything else. Salvatore stood at some grisly form of parade rest; his uniform was rusted over with blood, and one hand rested on his umbrella while the other kept a rifle slung over his shoulder.

“Is it only you?”

“Yes.”

Jett didn’t bother to ask how Salvatore had managed to find him. He imagined he would be told when they reached base.

Salvatore stopped when he heard a dog barking. Jett knew well enough to start walking faster. Jett knew he couldn’t outrun the dog, but he knew he could outrun any of the stragglers who might put themselves between the two by accident. He slowed down when he realized that he couldn’t hear Salvatore keeping pace with him. All Jett could here was the sound of his own lungs thrashing air in and then out of his nostrils.

He was about to turn and go back for Salvatore, who at this point was anchored in the center of the hall, when he boomed two words across the corridor:

_Keep running!_

Jett didn’t stop, but wished he could tell Salvatore that it wasn’t that he didn’t want to go, but it was that he didn’t know where.

~~

Sabir, as most big dogs are wont to be, was gentle unless she felt that Sadik was in harm’s way. She could certainly be the harm in someone's way should they decide to affront her companion. This was truly unfortunate for Salvatore, as he was a man whose sun rose at his dog’s tail and set at its snout, hence why he couldn’t bring himself to beat her away. He let her teeth sink into his bullet-bitten calf. _It can’t be ruined enough, can it?_

Sadik was not one to run, even if it would benefit both parties. He walked down the hall and wondered how many times Sabir could thrash her head before she snapped one of Salvatore’s tendons.

“ _Durmak.”_

Sabir complied. Sadik noticed the relief that dipped across Salvatore’s face. Sadik quickly wiped it off with the butt of his pistol.

“You have a lot of _nerve,_ boy, to come this far and with so little to your name.”

Salvatore was kneeling in spite of himself, something Sadik could tell was making him upset. He staggered upwards.

“How’s the leg?”

Salvatore bared his teeth. He was supposed to be smiling.

“Fine enough.”

Salvatore knew well enough that Sadik was toying with him, and that he was biding his time for the others to arrive. Salvatore also knew that he was in no place to try and land a blow, as he could barely balance on both of his legs. He just needed to keep Sadik from doing anything else to him while the bite on his calf closed up. He needed something that would get him angry enough to

He realized what he needed to ask.

“Sadik, why do you hate me so much?”

“Because you were a Crusader.”

“But you’re allied with Gilbert and you have a reasonable relationship with Spiro—“

“Because you were a Crusader and you were raised not to be,” Sadik wiped the sweat off his upper lip. “You left your family to rot for gold and oil paintings.”

Salvatore’s night locked in the Hagia Sophia cursed itself across his memory.

“I was a child.”

“Not the way real children are,” Sabir was circling at the end of the hall. There wasn’t much time left. “Do you really feel guilty about your conversion? You could have always reverted. You haven’t. You decided to strip away everything your mother gave you, because in the end you’re a spoiled, vain, violent _pig—“_

Salvatore hadn’t even realized until this moment that they had been speaking in Arabic.

“—and all you want is wine and raping and pillaging, because you’re a _sodomite—_ “

The word _sodomite_ was enough for Salvatore to get back on his feet. The force of the motion sent him barreling forward, his forehead colliding with Sadik’s nose and lip.

“When? _WHEN_ have I ever—“

“I’ve seen you, I see how you never look at women, I see how much you talk about being _chaste—“_

“That’s a _bold_ statement for someone who’s buggered a Kirkland!”

Sadik’s elbow collided perfectly with the bridge of Salvatore’s nose. The bone cracked loud enough for both to hear it.

“Christian guilt is the driving force of your entire existence. I may love men but at least I let that exist along with my faith. You’ve let Catholicism completely erase everything about you that made you unique.”

Salvatore snapped Sadik’s neck to get him to stop talking, because he knew he was right but was not about to admit that Sadik had a point. The adrenaline that came with snapping an empire’s neck (even a dying one) was enough for him to dodge the empire’s dog and run away from any potential auxiliaries who might have kept him in the building.

If anyone asked, his eyes had welled up because of his broken nose.

~~

Salvatore hobbled his way back to whence he’d came, a hurricane fighting the natural order to retrace its steps.

Jett was waiting under a large tree.

“You were supposed to keep running,” Salvatore’s split lip did no favors in making him look angrier, only making him look more rumpled and twice as devastated that Jett was the one he could rescue instead of anyone else.

“Sorry.”

~~

_Arthur,_

_I have retrieved Jett and await further instruction. I have liberated many other political prisoners being kept at the isolated location at which I found him. There is no longer any need to send auxiliaries whatsoever. Has there been any discussion as to the location of Spiro yet? It has been a long time now since he has gone missing._

_Malta,_

_You cannot keep wandering off as if there is no one who will be looking for you. You are deathless, but need I remind you that you are far from bulletproof. You were told to stand by until you received further instructions. Disciplinary action will be discussed when you return to London._

Arthur folded his reading glasses and placed them in his coat pocket. He made a mental note to divest more time into negotiations with the Germans about Spiro’s recovery, lest Salvatore desert his post and swim his way to Spiro’s location himself.

_I will send you information about Cyprus when I receive it. As of yet, there is none._

~~

It did not sit well with Antine that he now had to write to Salvatore in English rather than Italian to get his points across as clearly as possible.

 

_Salvatore,_

_Your cousin, my brother, was grievously injured a few weeks ago. As it stands, he is healing, albeit slowly, but it doesn’t seem that he will make a full recovery. Whether or not it’s enough for him to survive is also in question. Do what you will with this information; he cared about you a lot, and would most likely have asked to see you._

_Otherwise, I hope you’re well._

 

Salvatore squinted his way through Antine’s handwriting, regretting once again how he’d broken his reading glasses.

One thing nations refused to reveal to humans was how painful it was to feel your bones reconstructing at rates that were too fast for anyone to understand, and fast enough for the sake of survival but too fast for something as delicate as a human form to maintain in a sustainable way. Salvatore’s pain was centered right at the wide bridge of his nose. The thick gash from where Sadik’s pistol had connected with his cheekbone had already mended into a thick red line. He believed that would heal itself perfectly. He imagined his nose would as well, but the fifty pence sized crescent of missing flesh in his calf from a bullet he was never supposed to intercept in the first place reminded him that any kind of injury, if important or ludicrous enough, could find itself taking up permanent inconvenience on a nation’s body.

His sister once told him that their father had broken his nose over 50 times in his life, and that each time it mended itself back to its original wide, straight state. He reached up to touch it, winced, and let his hand settle back down into his lap. He tried to remember if he had his father’s nose.

The door creaked open. Jack and Jett had been together in Jack’s tiny cabin for about forty-eight hours. Jack had been brutally beaten by a few Turkish soldiers about five days before Salvatore had decided to take matters into his own hands.

“Salvatore?”

“Jett, you should be asleep.”

“I’ve been sent by one of the higher-ups.”

Salvatore finally turned around in his chair to look at Jett, one battered face to another.

“For what reason? They should be leaving you be.”

“It’s a gift.”

Salvatore wished to raise his eyebrows but then thought better of it.

“What gift could they think to offer me?”

Jett shuffled forward to drop the leather, cylindrical case into Salvatore’s upturned hands.

“Thank you, Jett. Go get some rest.”

Salvatore could see roughly seventy ill-bred responses creep across Jett’s face. Salvatore silently commended him for saying none of them.

Jett turned on his heel and made his way out the door, leaving Salvatore alone with the mystery gift. The leather was soft; Salvatore realized he couldn’t tell if it was soft from wear or soft from quality. He slipped it open and watched as a pair of gold-rimmed reading glasses and a note came tumbling onto his desk. He quickly put on the glasses to read the note curled in front of him:

 

_Malta,_

_Your handwriting has been poorly. I hope that with these glasses you may read and respond to my orders accordingly. Do not break them. They are not cheap, as I am sure you know._

_Sincerely,_

_Arthur_

~~

It was dark when Spiro regained consciousness behind the toolshed. The burns were already healing, but based on the throbbing in the back of his skull he’d sustained other injuries.

It had been a long time since the German officers had been asking him questions about what he knew, or if he was a spy; at this point, their only job was to beat him. He got the impression that it had become more of a chore for them now than any kind of gleeful task, but their dedication to causing him harm made him more than a little squeamish.

Sometimes he could hear an airplane taking flight, far off in the distance and in between the shrieks of the pickaxes. The nearest town was roughly fifteen kilometers away (but who was counting?). So far, he had known about five people who had decided to run for it in the dead of night. Four of them had been swiftly apprehended. Three of those four had now been worked to death. He imagined this was intentional, but he’d never had the time or the energy to ask the four German soldiers tasked with beating him into submission. He imagined that they wouldn’t have the answer he was looking for.


	12. Blemish

Roughly two thousand years prior to the telling of this story, a mother buried something in the desert for her children to find when they were safe again. She hoped she would live to see that day. Hoped.

~~

There is a grave just outside of a little town in eastern Corsica, just off the water where the Genoese had settled in droves. It is kept perfectly clean, making it easy to differentiate from the other graves that have been lost to time and foliage.

The grave’s namesake was lost at sea in a shipwreck, but the headstone made it easier to mourn than the alternative.

In 1914, days before being deployed in Belgium, Andria went to visit this grave with some flowers.

“There’s a war on now with the Germans. Or the Austrians, I should say, but not really. If it were really about us fighting the Austrians, nobody would be anxious about it. Francis cut my hair.”

The stone was silent. Andria didn’t know what he would have done if the headstone had responded to him, even though he tacitly wished for it to happen.

The lettering on the headstone still shone through from when Andria had come to clean it out with a toothpick:

**_GIOVANNA ALUARENGA PELLICER_ **

**_b. 1732 d. 1754_ **

**_A BELOVED WIFE LOST TOO SOON_ **

“I miss you.”

~~

It was a little over two hundred years prior to when the Great War had commenced. A younger Francis Bonnefoy and an Andria Pellicer just at the cusp of manhood sat facing each other in the spirit of “negotiations”, which both of them knew were not going to take place in the human sense of the term. Both men also knew that between nations, “negotiations” was merely a bloated, five-syllable word for the moment where two dogs gaze at each other before lunging at each other’s throats.

“I will be honest with you, as I prefer to be,” Francis averted his eyes to look at the clock, as he frequently did when he wanted to see how many lies he could tell within one minute. “Should you choose not to surrender, there would not be much you could keep from me.”

Andria’s dark eyebrows darkened further with the shadow of his forehead lowering.

“You are outnumbered, you are outflagged, you are outclassed. If you surrender, it will be a peaceful transition. No Corsican blood will be shed except for, I suppose, the blood of your current leaders, and I promise to keep you and your island safe from the Genoans until my dying day.”

“Funny you mention protecting me from Bernabò,” Andria leaned back in his chair and crossed his uncharacteristically well-booted feet at his wide ankles,

“He said the same thing to me and my brother about keeping me safe from the Saracens. He said that we were safe when he began to beat me. He said that I was lucky to be so safe from the Saracens when he was flogging me. He said that this was the price I was to pay for safety when he chained me in the bottom of one of his ships to row, standing in the vomit and seawater and piss until the skin on my feet blistered and burnt off and, God willing, I was allowed to rest for three days until my skin healed enough that I could start again. That was the price I paid to avoid an invasion, Genoa said. That nothing was free, and this was the toll if I had no inheritance to my name. Over five hundred years of free labor.”

Andria leaned forward again. The thick padding of his sea-worn coat hid that his body was still mostly scar tissue, elbows, and knees.

“And if all I have to my name right now is my father’s eyes, what are you going to take from me if not my freedom?”

Francis’s face seemed to soften when his gaze met Andria’s, but Andria knew what kind of look that was from having spent many years being examined like livestock.

“They are a lovely color.”

~~

Arthur didn’t know whether to do more or less for Andria, whose wounds had begun to heal but who still could not seem to breathe without assistance from spells that Arthur had less and less energy to cast with every minute.

It had gotten easier once Arthur had peeled the sigiled skin off of Andria’s arm; he also knew at that point that Andria was conscious enough to feel pain, since Andria’s back arched and he let out a garbled screech.

He knew he ought to tell Antine that it might be too late. He also knew he might not bother, since there was no choice in the manner. If Arthur had no energy left to sustain spells, they could not be cast.

~~

Antine could not quantify to those who spoke to him just how badly he would rather be drinking than digging in the North African sun in the desiccated, fenced-off skeleton of his ravaged childhood home. The ruins were unusually empty; the archaeologists who frequently dotted the site had all been drafted.

Most of his more modern sensibilities were telling him that he shouldn’t be doing this; by searching for what was most likely a lost cause he may be damaging the patrimony that his ancestors and extended family had fought desperately to maintain. When Antonio and Adão had offhandedly asked their older brother who their mother had been, Antine had been able to point to these ruins and say that their mother had built this palace, that their mother had sailed the ships now turning to coral reefs in the bordering oceans, and that Phoenicia had been her name and her empire. That Antonio and Adão were the sons of a great explorer, and they had that same drive that she did glowing just behind their eyes. He told them she loved them very much. She had given them names that Rome sought to take away, and which they must hold on to for the purpose of being sure that their mother lived and the man who fathered them would die. He had to hold his tongue when they decided not to remember. He hoped she would forgive them for not remembering her. How could they remember what they had never been a part of other than by birth?

His shovel struck something hard, and he crouched immediately to be sure it wasn’t just a rock.

The metal of the case was dull from two thousand years of tarnish. Antine used what was left of his upper body strength to unhook the case from its setting in the dirt. How he was going to manage to get back home with it and not arouse suspicion seemed another mystery that he was about to solve.

~~

The year was 1768. Arthur had seen Andria in shades of drunk and not drunk and of not wanting to be drunk but getting drunk anyways. Arthur had seen Andria in the throes of recovery and relapse from an opium addiction. Arthur had seen Andria after particularly bad floggings and particularly bad rounds in the galleys of ships going to areas of the world that Arthur sought to forget. But Arthur had never seen Andria look frightened.

Andria still did not look frightened, only exhausted. His face reminded Arthur of a deer at the end of the hunt, its eyes closing as the dogs closed in.

“You can’t do anything? Nothing at all?”

“I am forbidden from acting on your behalf.”

~~

One could not emphasize enough how rare it was for a nation’s cause to line up both socially and politically. Antine Pecora as Sardinia as a brother, son, cousin, and/or aspiring lover was rarely in agreement with Antine Pecora as Sardinia as a political entity.

The year was 1769. Antonio sat reading the letter from his spy in Avignon. Antine was pretending to not be reading over his half-brother’s shoulder.

“The French army has officially overrun Corsica.”

“Do they intend to annex the territory?”

“From what Francis has told me, Corsica was already bought by his government from the Genoese. He arranged with Bernabò some sort of wager on how quickly he could capture the territory, and he managed to buy your brother at a discount.”

_He’s your brother too._

“I don’t like this.”

“Me neither,” Antonio shuffled the letter and stowed it in his desk to be forgotten about.

The coldly cheerful expression on Antonio’s face never failed to rattle Antine.

“Let’s just watch and see how this plays out, yes? I don’t want to get our hands dirty over a lost cause.”

Antine was too busy trying to calculate how long it would take for him to reach Andria using the rowboat that was lashed to the pier near the castle, and whether or not he would be able to make the distance without his arms completely giving out.

~~

It was nearly 1770. It had been two hours since Andria had awoken in a room that he did not recognize with a searing pain in his eyes. Andria stood in front of the mirror where he was supposed to shave, transfixed by blue like he had never seen blue before.

Giovanna lurked with her engagement gift of green sea-glass earrings glinting in the lamplight.

_They’re the same color as your eyes, Andria._

His fingers quaked as he reached for his left eye, fingers trying to coax it past his eyelid.

A servant knocked at the door half an hour later.

“Corsica? You are being summoned.”

The door pushed open with minimal resistance. Corsica stood in front of his mirror and turned his empty eye sockets to look in the direction of the voice. The servant caught a glimpse of the dozens of eyes, severed by force from their stalks, which littered the ground at Corsica’s feet. One rolled towards the open door to gaze emptily at him, blue and vacant. The severed stalk had blood and some kind of other fluid leaking out of it.

“Can it wait?” Corsica choked. Half of an eye had already grown back into his skull, bluer than the one the servant was gazing into below.

Did the servant have any choice other than to quickly shut the door and run as fast and as far away as he possibly could down the hallway?

After the fiftieth eye grew back as blue as the first pair of defective ones, Corsica looked to see a framed document on the wall.

**NOTIFICATION OF SALE**

**This Receipt serves to make official the SALE of the SLAVE Andria Pellicer from BERNABÒ GENOVESE to FRANCIS BONNEFOY as of 14 JUNE 1764 for the price of 1,000 livres, Service effective Immediately.**

**This Receipt cannot be used to Annul or otherwise Trade the SALE of the GOODS listed, only to indicate that the SALE has occurred.**

Andria stumbled backwards, feeling the discarded eyes burst under his feet. He looked down to see the humor spit out of the pupil, shattering the blue iris into pulp between his toes.

~~

Arthur was expected to continue working on finding a way to regenerate the rest of Andria’s face from scratch while the war raged on over his head. Someone had told him that the Russians had surrendered. He had not been allowed to go to the emergency briefing; he had been told to continue with his trial and error in regards to the regeneration of Andria’s functional tissue.

 _This is a very rare opportunity,_ a medical officer had told him. _We may be able to use such methods on other patients with injuries similar to his._

The notion that Andria’s missing face and arm was far from an isolated incident is what upset Arthur the most.

There was a notification that he received indicating that Alfred had contracted and was showing symptoms similar to shingles not five days after arriving on the ground, and was not allowed to fly since he was delirious from the fatigue and the itching.

So Arthur was alone in a basement. On one end of the basement was a young man he cared about whose face was an open wound, and on the other end was a young man he cared about whose body was a weeping, blistered rash that should have never occurred in the first place.

 _We can’t contract viral infections like that;_ Arthur had argued. _Not unless it’s been contracted by over half of the population._

All the medical team had been able to offer him was a shrug.

_Do we have any other medic nations who might be able to lend me a hand? I can’t just magick peoples’ wounds shut._

The human medics exchanged looks.

_There is one, but he’s needed with the more readily dying._

Francis had been too busy with other, more important colonies dying and with his own failing health to come and pay any sort of respects to Andria. Arthur imagined Andria would not want to see Francis on his deathbed, either, so he imagined that it all worked out as they preferred it in the end.

~~

It had taken Antine thirty-six hours to copy down all of what was left of his late mother’s disintegrated handwriting into a newer, fresher book. It had taken him three more hours to see if he could still read what she had written, and it had taken one more hour to determine if he could splice what he knew from other sources together with that which he had before him.

It took him perhaps ten minutes to compose the telegram to Arthur. It was four hours before Arthur responded, but Antine had already left and was on the way back. Antine’s empty flask sat, forgotten, on the hotel desk. It was perhaps one of the few times in the last few centuries that Antine preferred to keep sober for something.

~~

Arthur had never known someone with a pox to start speaking in tongues, but Arthur was also learning that Alfred remembered more Wôpanâak than he had ever let on.

Antine physically kicking down the door was a welcome interruption for Arthur, who was never one to enjoy being left alone with his thoughts, let alone two of the greatest mistakes he had ever made.

Antine’s usually rather faint accent in English got thicker when he was emotional. Arthur refused to consider it endearing.

“I have something here that may be able to counteract the sigils.”

“The ones I shaved off of him with a potato peeler?”

Antine noticed the chunks of skin missing from Andria’s remaining arm.

“Oh, what the _hell—“_

“It’s deeper than the sigils. That’s what I told you in that telegram that I imagine you never received.”

Antine placed the thick, leather-bound notebook in Arthur’s hands.

“This is a composite of every spell my mother ever knew. If we know what she did, then we know how to _undo_ it.”

Arthur peered at the thick page that Antine had opened at.

“Do you have an English translation?”

Antine inhaled thinly through his teeth.

“I can make one. How long do you have with respect to time? Can you wait for me to—“

“Antine, we don’t have much time at all. I’m not strong enough to keep pushing oxygen into his lungs, which seem to be weakening due to the fact that the protection spells are working so heavily that they’re pulling energy from his own life support functions.”

Antine stalled over the text.

“Do your mother have a spell for reinflating a collapsed lung?”

“This one looks like it’s capable of reverting a body back to its original state. In this context, it might be our best bet; do you think something like this would annul someone’s protections?”

“Unlikely, but we don’t have many other options. If you translate it, I’ll perform it.”

“Do you have the energy right now for trial and error?”

“No. If we do this, I’ll have to stop with him for about three days. In that time, he most likely wouldn’t make it.”

Antine had barely noticed Alfred sweating in the corner until Alfred let out a wheezing cough.

“Do you think it’d do something for him?”

“Let’s find out. I have nothing else to do, and we don’t have time for ‘what-if’ right about now.”

“Wait.”

Arthur’s eyes narrowed before turning back on his heel to look at him.

“Did you not just hear me? We don’t have time to –“

“No, I just realized that if we perform the spell in English it might not work.”

“Tell me how to pronounce the words in Phoenician.”

“If you fuck it up, that might end ever worse.”

“I could use you as a conduit. You can read off the spell and I filter the energy through you. Some of you might siphon off into it, though.”

“That’s fine.”

“That means it might end up with a result neither of you like.”

“That means he’ll be alive. That’s the result I like, and I imagine that’s the one he does too.”

~~

There’s a point when you reawaken after being unconscious where you think your day has restarted, and that you’re in bed after a particularly bad dream. It takes about ten seconds for you to realize that you have, in fact, passed out. It then usually takes about five seconds for you to open your eyes and face whatever horrible reality your body was trying to shield you from.

Andria hurtled into awareness with a speed that alarmed both Antine and Arthur. The horrible reality his body was trying to shield him from didn’t do much in comparison to his brain forcing him to relive what he had survived while dreaming.

Andria’s hands closed around Antine’s biceps. There were still pale patches where his sigils had been; his skin on his regrown arm was about two shades paler than his original body.

The way Andria was calling his brother’s name as a question was concerning to all three parties.

“Can you see me?”

Antine pushed the hair out of Andria’s face. The eyelids on Andria’s left eye were fused shut in a gory, scarred knot. The right eye was rolling around frantically in its socket, the blue iris standing out against his bloodshot sclera.

“Andria, listen, we did the best we could –“

Arthur was drawn away by Alfred, who was begging to know how the hell a man who had just been reciting something in _complete_ gibberish was able to cure his shingles. Arthur asked Alfred if he remembered what magic was. Alfred said yes, don’t patronize me, but that thing he did ain’t what I remember magic being.

~~

Andria regained vision in his right eye and regained just enough of his senses to entertain his sense of vanity.

“I want to see what I look like.”

There was a chunk of broken glass that allowed for Andria to get the full scope of what he had survived. Antine sat on his blind side, holding the glass to Andria’s good eye.

“What’s worse: living ugly or dying beautiful?”

Andria didn’t react to the tremble in Antine’s voice. It hurt too much.

“I want you alive, Andria.”


	13. Singed

It had taken a lot for Antine to be convinced by his commanders that his brother was capable of being left in the care of the British and French; he was still being monitored by a medical team, albeit one with no background in Phoenician witchcraft. Before leaving, Antine had also begrudgingly given the text he had dug up and the replica he had so painstakingly copied to a pair of archaeologists who whisked both away to the British Museum.

He wondered if he would ever see them again, even if behind glass, or if one of the last remaining pieces of his mother would be left to crumble in a store-room instead of in the ground.

They had shaved Andria’s head to get a better idea of where the bullet’s exit wound would have been. They’d had minimal success in locating it, meaning one of two of his skull fractures had completely healed or that the bullet was still lodged in his brain somehow.

Antine scrubbed his hand against the stubble just above his brother’s blistered forehead. Andria barely stirred.

_Get better._

~~

Gilbert hadn’t been eating. You wouldn’t have been able to tell, thanks to his formal uniform. He wished Erzsi and Roderich would have been here to see what a fine figure he cut. They would have been able to tell that he was withering, but he chose not to think too deeply on that facet.

Ivan was sitting, as his superiors had told him that if he stood up he would be viewed as threatening and such imposition was an issue in a situation of surrender. He had also developed some kind of open, bleeding sore on his knees from whatever was going on with the Duma, so sitting benefited their scenario in more ways than one.

“Hope you’ve been practicing your signature better than you’ve been practicing your aim.”

Ivan looked down the double barrels of Gilbert’s eyes. Were the positions different, Ivan would not have minded turning the albino sideways and using the hollow of Gilbert’s cheek as an ashtray.

_This will be very different one day._

Ivan, temples burning hot under his hat, signed the terms of surrender.

_One day._

~~

Alfred’s lips wrapped thickly around the canteen of water that had been given to him, tilting his head back in tandem with the container. His nose had finally stopped bleeding and the dirt that crusted his face was tinged red from the incident.

“We were going to share that,” Matthew groaned.

“Not anymore!”

Matthew hadn’t remembered Alfred looking so bloated; Alfred had always been more than a little selfish when it came to sharing supplies, but he couldn’t remember the last time Alfred had looked this hungry while not being gaunt.

 _He’s going to have a growth spurt,_ Arthur had hissed under his breath. _Mark my words, Matthew, he’ll be even more of a problem in fifty years’ time._  
The only other person who had such proportions that Matthew could recall would have been Ivan, and Ivan had shed it very quickly when the stress of maintaining the Eastern front had gotten to be as great as it had been.

Matthew finally got back the canteen to see some remnants of Alfred’s lunch ration floating in what was left of the water. He didn’t feel brave enough to ask Alfred if that had been an accident or if such an inconsiderate gesture had been made strategically on Alfred’s part.

Matthew went for the third option: a vaguely condemning statement that seemed to address no one in particular, but allowed for one to wear it should it apply to them.

“Gross.”

~~

War had many similarities with prison. One of the more glaring ones was that soldiers were allowed to communicate via telegram or telephone with one that they loved very rarely. Letters were more frequently utilized for this reason.

Gilbert and Ludwig were ever so fortunate to be allowed to call one another whenever they saw fit.

“We’re not going to make it. It’s too much.”

Gilbert’s voice sounded harsher than Ludwig had remembered. The sigh that snapped its way into the receiver made him flinch.

“We’re not going to surrender.”

“What do you _want_ us to do, Gilbert? We can’t fight with nothing left.”

“Then we die.”

Ludwig was too diplomatic of a person to ask his brother to elaborate.

“I refuse to self-destruct when there may be other options. We need something to barter with.”

_That always separated you from me._

“We have nothing to negotiate with, Lud.”

Desperation pooled into Ludwig’s throat, giving his voice a faint whine that Gilbert had never heard come out of him before.

“Then let’s find something to negotiate with. We have to have _something._ ”

~~

Arthur read the telegram five or six times. There was no misunderstanding on his part, more shock that the answer had been so simple and had completely and utterly eluded him. He hoped the universe would forgive him for being so distracted.

_We have Cyprus and are willing to return him under certain provisions STOP_

Arthur’s face twisted at the word “provisions”. He wondered which German was speaking to him. His bet was on Ludwig or Roderich; Gilbert would never surrender something as valuable as a prisoner like Spiro for something as small as currying favor.

Arthur’s eyes flicked to the horizon. In spite of everything, the sun had risen again.

_I am listening STOP What do you mean by provisions STOP_

~~

When Brussels showed itself in Laura’s dreams it was how she had remembered it before the occupation: full of people who knew who she was, smelling faintly of sea water and beef fat, and full of a joyful agitation particular to those who lived in larger cities.

Laura would then wake up in the corner of the room where she was hiding and know that such a city may never return from what the Germans had done to her. Being neutral, it was her duty to be with her people rather than fighting a war that she never wanted a part in.

She had been sending letters wherever she could, but she had received no responses. Everyone else was too busy with each other to notice how busy others were with her.

She preferred to sleep as much as she could. Waking hours made her aware of how many people were looking for her. Whether they

Thick welts had begun forming on the inside of her thighs, making it difficult for her to walk. She did not have to go too far outside to know what the soldiers were doing to her children.

Whenever she was able, she stumbled toward a small market on the corner of the street. The people she could see were too frightened to recognize her.

“It’s enough to make you look to God, isn’t it?” one man said, filling her bowl with watery soup.

Her eyes remained fixed to the ground beneath her.

~~

We have heard relatively little from Austria for the past few years. Not that he hasn’t been doing anything (to the contrary); if he wanted to be heard, he would make himself so.

As the situation was very quickly spiraling into something that Roderich had absolutely no desire to be associated with, Roderich had chosen to do what he did best: odd jobs. That was a lie. He was terrible at odd jobs, but he was far more terrible at direct confrontation, specifically direct confrontations that could potentially be incorporated _with guns, planes, and mustard gas_.

The front on the mountains had not been so terrible. He’d done very little in the way of military engagement _That was why you did so poorly,_ the more reasonable quarter of his mind reminded him.

His commanding officers had also determined that seeing a frightened, gaunt Roderich in an ill-fitting uniform did relatively little for morale.

It would be more suitable, they reasoned, to use Roderich to find Austrian soldiers who had chosen to desert. What punishment for desertion could possibly be more effective than being personally confronted by the tattered remnants of your home country?

And that was what had brought Roderich to Zurich.

Allegedly there was a hub of deserters living within the city and working in the arts district. As Roderich knew exactly one person who lived in Zurich and also knew that this person disliked dishonesty over anything else, he assumed that he would be getting assistance from him.

Unfortunately for both of them, Roderich had conveniently forgotten that Basch hated his guts.

The woman who ushered Roderich into Basch’s comfortably brutal home complemented the décor perfectly. The third door she opened allowed for Roderich to see into what he assumed was a poorly lit art studio. Basch’s limp hair hung over his eyes while he sat crouched at what Roderich imagined was a worktable.

“Mr. Zwingli. You have a visitor.”

“I didn’t call for anyone.”

“He knows you by name and has a purpose, sir, so I suggest you address that aspect personally.” The woman vanished, stirring the stale air around them.

It was just late enough that the street lamps were beginning to be lit. The sudden influx of light allowed for Roderich to get a better view of what Basch had been hammering together.

“Why are you nailing all of these shoes into pinwheels?”

Basch’s face snapped up to look at him and Roderich realized he hadn’t spoken a word since arriving. Roderich’s unerring inability to speak without thinking of what he was going to say remained both an enormous gift and a horrific curse.

“Oh, it’s _you._ ”

Roderich could not yet tell whether he had missed his previous companionship with Basch or if he was just pleasantly surprised at someone being so honest with him about how badly they didn’t want to see his face.

“Hello, Basch.”

“What are you doing here?”

“You didn’t answer my question. What _are_ you doing?”

“And you didn’t answer _my_ question, which I think is significantly more pertinent, which is what the _hell_ gives you the idea you can come into my home at this hour? Do you have anything for me?”

“No.”

“Then you have no business here. Get out.”

“I will, but first please satiate my curiosity about the shoes.”

Basch’s face soured. It was more out of insecurity than true disgust. Roderich pretended not to have made that observation as to avoid jeopardizing his diplomatic mission further.

“It’s art. Sculptures.”

“Why are you making sculptures?”

“Why not? Why not turn shoes into art? Shoes are well-made, sensible things that ought to be displayed as artwork. They carry us so long for us to throw them away. They deserve to be turned into something nicer. We’re all going to die. Nothing matters. People are flooding my borders without limbs or faces. Even more are going hungry. I’m not fighting so I can’t tell them it will all be well, because I don’t know if it ever will be. We might as well put old shoes in art museums. At least we know one thing in the world will be beautiful because of us.”

Huffy, Basch went back to hammering. Roderich did not budge.

“I have a favor to ask of you.”

Roderich could see Basch swallow an exasperated groan.

“What do you have as collateral?”

Roderich lifted his leg up on the table, showcasing an ankle the color of skimmed milk.

“I’ve never been that sort of man, and especially not for someone like _you_ —“

“I’m giving you my shoe, idiot. For your…..installation.”

“That’s your collateral? A shoe?”

“You just said nothing means anything. What does it matter what my collateral is, so long as I have it?”

Basch’s lips pulled downward. The Austrian had a point.

“Both shoes. Then we’ll talk.”

~~

La Rosa was lying face up in a hospital that smelled sweetly of the deceased. He assumed that the wound he’d sustained would not be serious enough to force him to join them, but being transferred to the trenches had taught him that any of the worst things one could imagine were possible.

He made eye contact with his surgeon. His eyes were hazel, endless in their warmth and age. The light behind them looked far too much like the sunlight in La Rosa’s home province.

“Are you Naples?”

Lovino nodded curtly, with a smile that seemed to almost pain him.

“How is your grandfather?”

“He was well, last I heard from him. But I haven’t heard from him in a long time.”

La Rosa didn’t yet feel comfortable enough asking Lovino how he knew his grandfather, or his family as a whole. He imagined that would change as he healed.

Lovino didn’t like how La Rosa’s face was graying; he couldn’t tell if it was because La Rosa had lost a lot of blood or if he just hadn’t been in the sun for a long time. Lovino had already noticed how gray his _own_ skin was starting to look in these circumstances. During one of the busier days they’d had, Vietnam had once stopped him and asked him when he had slept last. He had not been able to give a definitive answer.

It was lucky for La Rosa that today was slow in the scheme of war hospitals. If La Rosa were to die, it would be out of the view of so many other dying strangers.

“Private, reposition your leg. I need to get a better look.”

La Rosa obliged, leg trembling with apprehension as Lovino’s scalpel got closer to flesh that had far too much sensation for La Rosa’s liking.

“Any changes in Catania in the past few years?”

“I wouldn’t know. I haven’t been back in a long time. My father sold the old inn we’ve had for many generations. The business was getting too hard to maintain with….things that were transpiring in the area.”

“Things?”

La Rosa chose this moment to act coy, which was unfortunately the exact point where Lovino decided it might be prudent to be more needling than usual.

La Rosa was remembering every time in schoolyards, bars, and late nights looking into his bathroom mirror that he told himself what he would do if given this exact opportunity.

Lovino was silently marveling at how much La Rosa resembled every other La Rosa that had come before him. He wondered if others thought the same thing about him and Feliciano in comparison to their father. He wondered if his descendants, God willing, would resemble him as well. Was there a bloodline on this Earth dominant enough to remain perfectly expressed since the dawn of the human race?

Lovino hiked La Rosa’s leg higher up in its stirrup. He would have to think more on this later, when there were fewer lives to save.

~~

Erzsi was sitting in one of the few moments of utter solitude she had experienced in a very long time. She was prudently using this rare moment to think harder about other people’s actions, specifically the ones that she had absolutely no control over.

When was the last time she’d heard from Roderich? When was the last time Roderich had decided she was worth writing to? When was the last time she had been able to look at him and know that he would support her, no matter what?

This had to end. All of it.

~~

Francis entered the dark room they were keeping Corsica in and pretended not to notice that it reeked of sweat and bile. Andria stirred awake, coughing when the lights flickered on.

Francis remembered how in earlier, simpler days, Rome had to hold Andria face down when disciplining him to keep him from clawing or biting at him. This was something that Genoa had continued.

As Francis recalled, Andria’s brother had always been the runt between the two of them. To Francis, that made him more dangerous. He would take strong and furious over weak and conniving any day of the year.

Andria tilted his face up, his wry smile gleaming in the lamplight.

“Like what you see?”

The red scar bit its way down a quarter of Andria’s face, having swallowed his left eye and eyebrow in its rage.

“Can’t say that I do.”

Francis was never one to gloat in public, but couldn’t help but notice that the bullet had taken out Corsica’s green eye. His hair stood at attention in brittle bristles on his temples, sparing no angle of Corsica’s face from scrutiny. His good eye squinted. Francis could tell that he was trying to narrow the other eye as well; the scar tissue was contorting in an attempt at normalcy.

“What does it look like out there?”

“The Russians surrendered, but with the added resources from the Americans I’m starting to think that we’ve finally got the Germans running on fumes.”

“Oh, _finally?_ How many of yours are dead now? If I look like this, I can’t imagine what you’re hiding under that pretty uniform.”

Francis felt the weeping sores on his back begin to itch. He wondered if his back was weeping at comparative rates as to all the widows he’d yet to visit on the home front.

“Will you be coming to the front lines again any time soon?”

“Me?” Corsica’s voice had become hoarse from minimal usage. “You’re joking. I’m blind.”

“Your brother can barely see, but they have him equipped up in the mountains. I didn’t know what they’d decided on your case, since you still have vision in your right eye.”

“My brother can barely see because he wears those stupid glasses that hide his eyes from people. If he puts on a pair of tactical goggles that obscure people’s view of his face but still allow for him to see, his vision is better than most people’s. Meanwhile, I am missing most of my face, and my people seeing me missing most of my face would most likely not produce a positive result.” Andria shrugged. “I’d love to rip that German brat in half the same way I did with his older brother back at Austerlitz, but something tells me that I’m not in the shape I used to be in.”

Francis’s lips thinned into an expression Corsica imagined was supposed to be sympathetic.

“Did your mother have a spell to raise the dead as well as one to heal your face? Otherwise I don’t see how we could rally enough to fully bring them to an end. At this point I don't have it in me on my own to fight anymore, only to negotiate.”

Andria sat silently. Based on how his fingers were positioned, Francis assumed he was trying not to scratch at the healing skin on his cheek.

“Did the Hun beat the _élan_ out of you? Is that what I’m to understand?”

Francis turned to leave.

“We’ll see.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this is so late!! I moved on the 31st; I've been unpacking and looking for a summer job and only barely got the energy to finish this today.


	14. Catharsis

_It was long before the birth of Christ. Romulus sat watching his firstborn son sleep. The first promise he had made when his heir was born was that he would never have to claw his way to legitimacy the way Romulus had been forced to. The second promise he made was that the child in his arms and the children that would inevitably follow after him would not know the kind of cruelty that had both been perpetrated by and inflicted upon Romulus by his adversaries._

Alas, it was long after the birth of Christ. Romulus had been fortunate to have not lived long enough to bear witness to the full capacity of what mustard gas could do to his children and grandchildren.

~~

Two facts about Roderich Edelstein: the first was that he had always considered moonlighting as a journalist under a pseudonym to satiate his worst quality, which was that he was insufferably nosy. Maria Theresa had tried to curb this quality into research for diplomatic endeavors, but it had only stoked the flames for his desire to know things nobody else did (the fact that people did not want to know the details due to how sordid they were did not deter him).

The second was that he was so deeply embarrassed by this bad habit of his (and mortified at the thought that someone else might have this sort of knowledge about him that could be circulated in retaliation) that he refused to tell anyone about anything that he had found while digging through people’s desks, garbage, or any salacious tabloid stories. He relegated most of these findings to a monstrous wooden cabinet, where he wrote summaries of what he knew on small scraps of paper and filed them in alphabetical order.

The largest quantity of information was against Gilbert, Francis, and (to Roderich’s surprise) Ivan, who had previously had very little information in circulation about him but such material had quadrupled in the past ten years alone.

When he had fallen upon the hundreds of letters hidden under Erzsi’s side of their mattress many years prior, he read all of them, pretended he hadn’t, and he had said absolutely nothing at all to anyone of it.

~~

La Rosa, as many had come to find out, was told that the war was ending. He was not to return to combat and was to be returned to his native island as soon as he was able to walk properly. That second clause was the most important one of the sentence.

Lovino Vargas walked in to change his dressing and La Rosa realized it would be his last chance to ask him what he had been boasting of for decades.

“Naples?”

Lovino knew what La Rosa was going to ask just from the angry tilt of his wide chin, but allowed it.

“Yes.”

“Why did you kill her?”

In more ways than one, Lovino’s medical training was the only thing that allowed La Rosa to live. Had he not been focused on changing his bandages, Lovino would have throttled him.

“I didn’t kill her. She died in childbirth. In fact,” Lovino reapplied the dressing. “I would have been able to save her if I’d been allowed in the delivery room. Before our son was born she had gotten into a fight with some men involved with some _brigandi._ They were going to shoot her. In the scuffle trying to disarm him, the gun went off and the bullet shattered my pelvis. I was confined to a wheelchair for six months. Were it not for that injury, I would have been able to help.”

Lovino sealed the bandages. His tone implied that he had relived this story frequently.

“The man who fired the gun was your father.”

Lovino finished, wrapped his tools with the same attention to detail, and walked out the door.

~~

Salvatore was only notified of the retrieval of Cyprus after the Allied retreat from the Dardanelles had been fully put into effect. He, New Zealand, and Australia had initially been ordered to stay in Turkey until further instruction. Salvatore imagined that this stratagem was based far more in hope than in fact, as the only gain he could think of was in the retrieval of Australia prior.

Jett’s nose still had yet to heal, and Jett had taken to hiding the small shard of bone still peering out from under the skin with a bandage. On occasion he would take it off to try and frighten someone into giving him a free drink. If you asked anyone involved, his rate of success at this endeavor merited higher than the success rate of the entire Turkish campaign.

“Maybe they’ll make me a general next time we have a global war like this one.”

 _Ideally,_ New Zealand mused, _there will never be a next time._

Arthur had chosen to not disclose the state Cyprus had been returned in when relaying the information to Malta, as to not upset an already delicate diplomatic situation further than necessary.

When writing the telegram to notify him, Arthur had never determined which name he was supposed to use when referring to Cyprus. Somehow he felt calling him Spiro (or even his proper English name, Stephen) was improper.

_He’s your colony. You can call him whatever you damn well please._

Arthur thought of Seychelles and her refusal to go by any European name other than Michelle.

_Malta,_

_Cyprus has been returned by the Germans, where he was kept in a prisoner of war camp after his airplane crashed. You are being summoned to collect him and return him to his people._

He hoped Malta might be a face that Cyprus would recognize. After all that had transpired, he imagined that nations needed to be amongst their own kind until humanity had recovered from the war effort.

Something told Arthur that it would take longer than he could currently fathom.

When Malta arrived in London, he did not understand initially why none of the people who spoke of Spiro being recovered were smiling.

When he finally was ushered into Spiro’s temporary quarters, he understood why.

~~

Erzsi and Roderich sat in the same room for the first time since anything had gone right, so by Erzsi’s count it had been several years.

“The Ottomans have surrendered.”

“I know.”

“Sadik gave me early notice,” Erzsi continued, “and he should be signing the terms for armistice as we speak.”

Roderich had the decency to at least pretend like he was a deciding factor in wartime affairs, even though they both knew this was a barefaced lie.

“Why did he talk to you and not me?”

_Because I’m the one in the military uniform, and because after all these years he likes to push himself into my life every now and then just so I don’t try to forget that he exists and that he still thinks he’s relevant. He’s never acted that way around you because you are not and never have been a woman under his protection._

“Couldn’t tell you.”

Erzsi could tell that things on the home front were not going as planned based on the state of the fever blister that had opened up on Roderich’s top lip and the hangnails that split open his long fingers.

“What do you want to do?”

Erzsi leaned her cheek against the pad of her palm. Her fingernails were short, and it was her callused fingertips that made the thick drumming noise on the countertop.

“I want to do two things.”

Roderich was trying to swallow the saliva building in the corners of his mouth, hoping it would wash down any bile trying to climb its way up his throat. His wife was one who did not throw surrender terms as loosely as he did. Based on the demonstrations he had seen in Vienna as of late, this would not bode well for any future military engagements.

“I want to do two things,” Erzsi repeated.

“I want to negotiate terms of surrender for us and withdraw from the conflict entirely.”

“Agreed.”

Erzsi’s face softened apologetically, the resolve she’d felt on the field draining out from under her toenails and seeping out of the holes in her boots.

“And I want a divorce.”

Roderich sipped his coffee and said nothing. He set the saucer down and scraped at a chip in the enamel.

“Nothing from you?”

“Erzsi, the times when you say you’re in your element have always been the times where I’m the farthest from you. This has never been a question of “if” for me, more of when. If that is what you see as best, then I won’t stop you.”

“And the others?”

“I imagine that France and England will have _plenty_ to say about our wards when it comes to negotiating the surrender.”

Erzsi was close enough to Roderich to see two flecks of dandruff nested in the dark of his hair. She would brush it away, but imagined he did not want to be touched by her (or anyone, for that matter) for the foreseeable future.

“I assume Gilbert is the one listening through that keyhole, based on the way the door shook a few minutes ago,” Roderich said, finishing his coffee. The door trembled a second time.

“But assuming that he heard us, you both ought to tell Ludwig.”

“Right.”

“You didn’t tell me Gilbert had escorted you here.”

Erzsi got up.

“It seemed too commonplace to mention.”

Roderich took off his glasses and began to polish them on the fraying hem of his coat.

“Goodbye,” Erzsi offered.

“Goodbye.”

Roderich was already drafting a surrender letter in the back of his head when Erzsi closed the door behind her.

It was only when Gilbert addressed her in German that she realized that her entire conversation with Roderich had been in Hungarian.

It was also worth noting that Gilbert, in spite of everything, had never managed to learn Hungarian beyond saying _hello, goodbye_ , and _I love you_.

The expression on Gilbert’s face implied something that she knew already: he didn’t know what was coming.

“So?”

“We’re getting a divorce.”

Gilbert nodded.

“And we are withdrawing from the conflict.”

“What?”

“It’s over.”

~~

Germania had been known for four traits. He was first known for being pragmatic and self-preserving beyond the point of empathy. He had not lived long, but he had lived longer than he would have thanks to his suffocating devotion to putting himself and his family first.

This was not something that he had fully passed down to Gilbert, but had definitely passed down to a higher extent to Ludwig.

Frequently in direct contradiction with his first trait was his second, which was that if he was devoted enough to a cause or a person he could very easily get lost in it. This is what had won him more enemies than anything else. This is what had finally killed him.

With sparing exceptions, he had passed this singularity down to his children in spades.

Ludwig had no idea that putting his hands over his head was something that he could be able to do so quickly.

What surprised him more was how easily his brother seemed to do it.

When the armistice was called, Ludwig and Gilbert sat together in a room where the silence loomed just as large as the gravity of their predicament.

“Gilbert?”

“Yes?”

“What are our prospects?”

Gilbert leaned up against the wall.

“Would you like my opinion as a tactical officer, or my opinion as your brother?”

“Both.”

“Lud, I don’t think we’ve ever been this fucked.”

~~

Erzsi and Lily were sitting in an alleyway as Erzsi desperately tried to get her to stop bleeding from a wound that had begun to open on her chest. Lily had been too shocked to ask Erzsi what was going on; Erzsi knew why but was too overwhelmed to have given her a decent response anyhow.

“Lily, I need to leave. Stay put. Don’t move. I’ll find someone.”

Erzsi running through the streets covered in blood was something people had become accustomed to.

~~

The first time Francis had realized that Ludwig was a force worth reckoning with was in Versailles. Francis chose Versailles to be the place that the Bielschmidts would learn their place at the table. It had been nearly half a century since they had crowned the Kaiser of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors.

Francis had been called upon to pay five billion francs as an indemnity to the newly formed German state.

Gilbert had said that he had not wished to make Francis a permanent enemy, and that he hoped that they could still remain friends after the settlements were over.

 _No worries,_ Francis had said, wincing as he felt Alsace and Lorraine’s occupation begin to infect his kidneys. _It would take far more than this for me to never forgive you._

Francis believed that they had reached far more.

Arthur hovered at Francis’s side, sour breath stirring the hair resting at Francis’s earlobe.

“If we’re too harsh, we’ll make them a martyr.”

“We’ve been drafting this damned treaty for six months,” Francis snapped. “If it’s too much for them, that’s their problem.”

“Need I remind you that this is a treaty for peace?”

_This is a treaty that will kill him the way he tried to kill me._

Germany was required (among other things, but Francis was in too much pain to address anything very deeply at the moment) to pay twenty billion marks in reparations, to _never_ re-militarize, and to renounce all colonial endeavors.

“It will go to plan.”

“Then why are you grinding your teeth?”

“Because _I’m_ the one who’s going to make sure that it goes to plan.”

The doors opened.

Gilbert could look into Francis’s eyes and see his reflection perfectly in how glazed they were. That was a terrible sign.

The treaty was frightening enough that one officer had resigned rather than allow for it to go into effect. Another terrible sign.

Gilbert had heard that France had threatened an invasion if Germany chose not to accept the terms that they had agreed upon. Nobody had allowed for either him or his brother to look at it, lest they know what kind of effects it would have on their physical forms. Also a terrible sign.

France had demanded that Germany sign a singular treaty, while those who had been allied with Germany had signed separate agreements. This, to Gilbert, was the most terrible sign of all.

Gilbert had been the one who had been nominated to sign the symbolic copy instead of Ludwig, who was to be physically present in the room for the signing by their respective leaders.

Gilbert sat in a chair with an entire wall of Allied nations surrounding him.

_I die here. At this desk. Twirling this goddamn pen._

Gilbert sought out familiar faces: Alfred. Lovino. Arthur. Feliciano. Antine. He was not ready to make eye contact with Francis a second time.

_How many of you did I destroy and how many of you did I help create?_

Gilbert did not read the treaty. It would hurt him no matter what.

Gilbert signed his name and counted the seconds before his heart stopped beating.

Five, to be exact.

~~

The other two traits that people remembered most clearly about Germania were his ability to depersonalize and distance himself if he chose to (“chose” being the operative word, making his singularity all the more perplexing), and a fascination with birds.

Vasch was the only one of his children who inherited Germania’s entire personality. People had forgotten who his mother was and assumed that he had sprung fully formed out of Germania’s left side.

When Erzsi had come running back with a doctor, Lily had vanished.

It came as a surprise to no one who had known his father or his siblings when it became known that Vasch had taken Lily on and made her his singular purpose.

~~

If one leaves wine out unattended on a counter for too long, it sours into vinegar. Feliciano was similar in that regard.

Lovino found his way into the office that Feliciano had been allotted in the tiniest corner of the most inconspicuous government building in Rome. Feliciano had relegated most of his official government position to a small writing desk in the corner, while the window and shelf space had been taken up by three easels, six canvases, a myriad of what Lovino recognized to be cartography tools, and two telescopes of different magnifying powers.

“You saw them at the peace conferences, Lovino. They were laughing at us. I’m sick of it.”

“They had every right to laugh, if we’re being honest with ourselves. The Americans did more for the war effort in two years than we did in five. I don’t see how that’s going to change unless we completely change everything that makes us what we are.”

“We were made to be an empire,” Feliciano responded. “It’s in our blood.”

Lovino did not like the haughty tilt of Feliciano’s chin.

“We were never meant to be fighters,” Lovino continued evenly, breaking eye contact with his younger brother and pacing around the two yards of office space that weren’t littered with paper. “Father made sure of that.”

“No, Father died before he could make sure anything about us could be certain. The finger we need to point is at the _French,_ the _Austrians,_ the—“

Feliciano’s voice turned high and feverish. The whine was one that Lovino knew from when he was younger: it meant Feliciano was trying not to cry.

“They made sure we became _nothing._ Are we going to allow for this forever?”

“Feli—“

“I’ve already had what I want, Lovino. And I want it back. I’m not content with having it dangled in front of me for no good reason.” He gestured at his easel, which was bowing slightly at the weight of the painted canvas. “I’m painting pictures while you’re off herding sheep in the mountains. That is not the life we were destined to be living.”

Feliciano got up from his desk, his round face flushed once again with a faint sunburn.

“You only say we’re not fighters because you’ve never won anything in your life.”

The easel finally snapped and spilled its cargo as Feliciano walked past him. Feliciano did not turn back to rescue the canvas, which had been impaled on the corner of his crowded desk. Lovino could see the brown paint at the seams of what had once been a beautifully rendered sailboat on the coast of Dalmatia.


	15. Reversed

A little known fact is that when Poland was last partitioned, Feliks’s body had fallen to pieces and his consciousness to dormancy. These pieces did not rot away, but were hidden by those responsible in saint relic displays, scattered around his old territory. The task was left to his beloved to search for Feliks’s partitioned body and attempt to reassemble him. A few noble Poles had joined him on his search, but none had lived to see it come to fruition.

Toris placed the pale left arm adjacent to Feliks’s torso. He hadn’t been allowed at Versailles, but he knew from the energy in the air that he wasn’t going to be alone for long. Feliks’s limbs began to reattach to each other, and what had resembled a broken shop mannequin re

“Wake up.”

Feliks’s lungs rattled with their first breath in over a hundred years. His eyes opened to meet Toris’s.

“Toris.” His face softened and he sat up on the wooden table, his gaze luminous in the dark room. “What have I missed?”

~~

Ludwig stood in what had been the parlor of Roderich’s sprawling parlor, just a segment of his and Erzsebet’s underground chambers on the Schönbrunn estate. Roderich was sitting neatly on top of a monstrous pile of cardboard boxes, each one labeled with destinations: “Carlsbad”. “Auction”. “Erzsi”. Ludwig saw one that had his name on it, but felt it inappropriate to ask for it.

“We don’t know when Gilbert is going to wake up. Based on what they could determine of his condition, I don’t feel he will be coming to for several weeks at the very least.”

“You look fine. Did he take all of the damage?”

His bandages strained underneath Ludwig’s vest.

“Yes.”

“If he can survive that, he can survive anything.” Roderich was smoking, which he had never done in front of Ludwig before, but he also felt that the world as they all knew it was falling apart and that Ludwig had seen enough to see Roderich with a cigarette. He wasn’t wrong.

“You seem to be handling the divorce well.”

Roderich’s eyes avoided Ludwig’s as he began rolling up the map that had been on his writing desk.

“Ludwig…as you get older, you will learn that frequently, the only way to handle some things is ‘well’.”

“I’ve been thinking that it might mitigate some of the damage if we unified our territories.”

Roderich took off his glasses.

“Don’t be ridiculous. You could never afford me.”

Ludwig’s lips pressed together into a thin, uncomfortable line. _Too soon_.

“So where are you going?”

“I’m downsizing. I’ve maintained a small studio downtown for whenever I felt like giving piano lessons to the children of politicians. I’m going to give up this space and convert that studio into a modest little bachelor’s apartment.” _I haven’t been living any of those three words in a long time, but nobody has to know that._

“If you’re planning to stay with me for a few days, you’re going to have to lift things.”

“That’s fine.”

“Start with that table.”

~~

There was four days that Andria was allowed to report back to his home in Ajaccio before he was expected to join Francis in Paris, then London for a chain of meetings revolving around diplomacy, their economic recovery, and the newly formed League of Nations.

At first glance, his people did not recognize him. He had grown a beard, his skin had gotten sallow and had greyed in the trenches, and most importantly, his face was heavily bandaged. At second glance, his people did not wish to recognize him.

They gave him a wide berth. Looking directly at him meant remembering the young men who had died in his name. They already got enough reminders from being the sisters, fathers, mothers, aunts, and uncles who had been left behind. Andria couldn’t remember a time where he had been able to part the crowds quite like this.

His home was just outside of town, big enough to keep him and any few people who might choose to visit. Those few people rarely did, so the house was largely empty if he wasn’t in it. His garden was overgrown, bursting with vines that he couldn’t recall having ever planted.

The whining he could hear down the street and increased with each time he asked a question they both knew the answer to very well: “Who’s my girl?”

The mastiff burst through the front door the minute his lock surrendered to his key, bowling Andria over for the first time in several years. She had been waiting diligently at the top of the stairs since his departure.

_I am._

Governments dispensed one attendant to take care of the resident Nation’s estate while they were away at war or on business. In his time away, Andria had received one memo about his dog dragging the poor old man designated to her down the street once every morning and once at night. He had heard of attendants for other houses being forced to take inventory of a leftover baker’s dozen of cats, or stumbling in on a forgotten room with a very hungry monitor lizard.

Her name was Diaula, and she was known through the neighborhood for being all bark and no bite. He’d found her at the end of his days working in the Genoese galleys. She’d rewarded him with her companionship ever since.

Andria dropped his bag inside the house and hacked his way through what had once been a reasonably well maintained herb garden.

It took about ten minutes for him to get to what had once been a terrace, and twelve for him to notice his brother sitting on a chair that had been consumed by the overgrowth.

“Who let you in?”

“I did,” Antine said with a shrug, gesturing to the unoccupied chair across from him.

“How long have you been here?”

“Not long. It hasn’t been unpleasant, either. I like your house.”

Andria folded himself into the iron chair; it was clear from how the two of them situated their legs that the set had been purchased and made for someone at least six inches shorter than them.

“Have you ever considered renting out some of the rooms here? I bet you’d make a killing off of the tourists.”

Andria had the same biological aversion to making an honest living as some had to shellfish or dairy.

“There’s not really a need for that yet. I still have things I can sell if I need the income.”

Andria templed his fingers.

“But we both know that real estate’s not the reason you’re here.”

“No. I have something to give you and a proposition for you as well. Would you consider….just consider, mind you…becoming Italian?”

“You know that’s not something I’m allowed to do.”

“When have you ever cared about rules? You weren’t allowed to secede from Genoa, either.”

“That was over a century ago. The framework has changed. I don’t have a way out of my contract with Francis.”

“I could make one.”

“Well if you do that, you’d have far more going for you than just my addition to your territory. But Antine, be honest with me: my joining of the Italian landmass wouldn’t be the first choice, would it? I’d be a consolation prize.”

Antine inhaled through his nose and tilted his head back.

“I know you all want Dalmatia more than you want me.”

“Feliciano’s very adamant about being reunited with him,” Antine admitted.

“Is there some kind of amorous element to all of this that he isn’t letting us know about?”

“I feel like Feliciano is open enough about his sex life that he’d let us or a tabloid know if that were the case,” Antine reached back into the knapsack he had slung over the back of his chair. He pulled a parcel wrapped in butcher’s paper out of it and dropped it on the table, making it shake from the impact.

“This is the copy of Mother’s spells that saved your life. You’re the one out of the two of us who got the gift, so I figure it ought to be you who should keep it.”

Andria’s long, thin face was mobile enough behind the bandages that Antine could make out a brief expression of disbelief.

“I thought some archaeologists kept it.”

“The original has gone into some corner of the British Museum, yes, but the copy I made I was able to bargain for once they had copied it themselves.”

“How many copies of this book exist now?”

“Who knows? But it’s yours to read or burn at your leisure. I don’t know. Make your cooking fires sing. Bless your house with wealth. Bring back that girl you loved all those years ago from the dead.”

Andria’s first impulse was to respond _which one_ ; the look on his face revealed pretty quickly what girl he would consider damning himself for.

“I have no magical predilection to me—“

“Didn’t you read the incantation?”

“Arthur used me as a conduit, which I wouldn’t recommend ever submitting yourself to.”

“Don’t like him inside you?”

“I’d much rather be manhandled by someone without an ulterior motive, is what I’m saying.”

Andria shrugged.

“Difficult to find amongst our kind.”

“Is that why you only go after human girls?”

“Humans are the only partners I can be certain don’t have some kind of writ that entitles them to ownership of me specifically.” He let out a snort. “And they’re always _so_ impressed by me that I just can’t bring myself to say no.”

“You’d think that we’ve been onto each other’s bullshit for so long that nations would have stopped having sex entirely by now.”

“No, if anything I’ll bet it’s only going to get worse now that the war’s been settled so terribly. People love one-upping each other, but I feel like nations are worse. We’ve been at it for too long. Look at us. Regeneration’s been at a standstill for something like a thousand years. Our last permanent death was several decades ago—“

“Assuming that she doesn’t spring fully formed out of someone’s head in the next five years.”

Andria rolled his remaining eye.

“You carried that coffin yourself. She’s gone. She’s _been_ gone. There’s no point in us waiting for a miracle. The only person who’s ever risen from the grave for the overall good of mankind is Jesus Christ, and even that’s questionable.”

“How can you speak that way of your _betrothed_?”

“Fuck you. More tellingly, there’s been no real births—“

“Czechia and Slovakia just announced that they’re expecting a child, actually.”

Andria shook his head.

“Don’t count that baby until it survives being born. Speaking of Serafina, I hope they’re watching Czechia like a hawk. Otherwise, we’re here to stay, unless someone does something worse.”

“Worse than what we just witnessed?”

“Oh, sure. We’ll be at the draft tables again in half a century at most. Someone with too much money’s going to make a toy that can rip countries apart and drop it on some poor archipelago for a laugh. I’d stake my other eye on it.”

“If we’re being perfectly honest, I don’t think you and I are going to see fifty more years. Not if we don’t get independence. It’s not been too long under official sovereignty of Italy and I’m already seeing some ageing.”

“You, Antine? Don’t be ridiculous. The royal family is still your own. The ones who should be worried are those two boys from the mainland. You haven’t aged since Ferdinand and Isabella.”

“I still have stretch marks,” Antine said in a tone that wanted to be fond but was more one mired in memories that had been wished many times to be forgotten.

“Am I going to see you in London?”

“Maybe. More accurately, there’s a 1 in 3 chance. There’s some discussion currently over which one of us should be going for diplomacy meetings now that we’ve met zero of our projected goals for the state in entering the conflict in the first place. They think sending in all three of us is too intimidating, especially since we’re all such different people and serve such different purposes.”

“Irredentism is that deep?”

“You’re smart. You should write for the papers.”

“Fuck you,” Andria repeated. Antine got up from his chair and Diaula’s tail thumped against the grass.

“I just wanted to see if you were better than when I last saw you. Do you need me for anything else?”

Andria’s face thinned further, which Antine knew was because he was biting on the insides of his cheeks.

“Would you mind staying the night? Would they miss you?”   
“I will, and they wouldn’t,” Antine lied.

~~

Francis used to like the game of diplomacy. At one point, he had been quite good at it. That was before his patience had been executed by firing squad.

Arthur stopped him at one point coming out of a meeting room to tell him something or other. Francis could not make himself focus on Arthur’s face, only the area directly surrounding it. Arthur repeated himself about twice before he really noticed how much Francis’s eyes had glazed over.

“You’re not yourself. Not the same.”

Francis licked his bottom lip.

“No, I’m not. Nothing is.”

“If this League Alfred set up is going to work, it’s imperative that we seem as we were. That’s the only reason people are choosing to join. I’m standing in for my colonies; I said that barring a few, they were not required to attend these next few days. We don’t have that luxury.”

“You’re right.”

“Get some rest.”

~~

Lovino couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in Paris for anything other than business.

Lovino also couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so disrespected after being told that his participation in diplomatic concerns, as the representative for predominately agricultural endeavors in Italy, wasn’t one that seemed valuable. Lovino looked the poor clerk who had been forced to relay that information to him in the eye and stored his disappointment in the bridge of his nose to sneeze out later.

“Noted. Thank you for telling me. Did they tell you who they would be sending?”

“Feliciano will be going to Paris and Antine will be sent to London. They expect you to stay in Rome and maintain some sense of sameness here.”

The judgment was reasonable but unkind. So, to Lovino, it was exactly what he had expected.

When asked what he planned to do between the League of Nations meeting and the time he had to board the boat back to Rome, Feliciano had said that he was going to go to Parc Monceau and draw trees until he fell unconscious. Someone who didn’t know him very well would assume that he was being facetious, but anyone who knew him well enough knew that this was one of the very few things about him that had stayed the same since he was a little boy.

Feliciano said relatively nothing during the official national reunion, noting to himself that it felt very much like how the national reunion during the Congress of Vienna had felt: everyone at their seats behaved, but everyone knew that when they closed their eyes all they could see was that which Napoleon had done to them, as if it was tattooed on the back of their eyelids. Similarly, Feliciano could only see the Dalmatian coastline reflected back at him in the eyes of his supposed allies.

It was three quarters into the summit that he realized he was only invited as a formality and not because anyone had chosen to rectify what had been done prior. He left the moment he felt he was allowed to, and smoked two entire cartons of cigarettes as he stalked through the 8th to his hotel. He retrieved his sketchbook, four sticks of charcoal, two pencils, a pencil sharpener, and four more cartons of cigarettes that he’d rolled himself the night before he’d left Rome. He was halfway to the park when he realized that he’d forgotten his eraser.

“Feliciano?”

Feliciano turned to look at Francis, who was leaning against a street lamp in a way that made Feliciano feel was calculated, but was actually perfectly natural to him.

“What the hell are you doing all the way over here?”

“I’m going to the park to draw.”

“At night? In this weather? You’re just as likely to get propositioned as you are to catch a cold.” Francis placed a cigarette of his own between his lips. “Do you have a match?”

Feliciano pulled out the tiny lighter that he’d fashioned for himself in the trenches. Both of them shuddered, but both of them used it in spite of themselves.

“What are you doing out here, then, if it’s so unfavorable?”

“I walked Feliks to his hotel after he bought me a drink near the galleries. He looks incredible, given what happened to him. No scarring at all.” Francis looked at the silvery lines that made their way up his hands. “I can’t quite say the same for myself, but I imagine these will fade in due time.”

Feliciano’s only awareness of his hands revolved around the cigarette smoldering between two of his fingers; the January cold had rendered the rest of him quite numb.

“I can’t imagine people locking my body parts away in relic containers.”

“Catholics,” Feliciano responded as sagely as his limited French would allow.

Francis laughed.

“I’m Catholic, but I must not be Catholic enough if that’s what it requires.”

Francis looked down the street at the looming shadow of a building Feliciano had passed earlier but felt, like many of the grandiose things in Paris, was too much to give a fleeting glance to.

“I don’t know if anyone told you this, but the Grand Palais was converted into a military hospital for a few years. I noticed that even after all this time I can still smell the blood and antiseptic inside it.” Francis turned to look at Feliciano. “I wonder if that will be the same for the rest of us.”

Feliciano saw the coast of Dalmatia and the collective hurt of over one million French casualties reflected in Francis’s eyes.

“I couldn’t tell you.”

Francis felt like a fool speaking to someone he’d considered beneath him in this way, but it was a kind of foolishness he was ready to fall back into.

“I live in the 18th, it’s forty minutes from here regardless if we take the Métro or if we walk. Do you want to come with me? I have a dog and some cognac.”

Feliciano was taken aback by the directness, but consented.

On the night he was supposed to return, Feliciano cancelled his return trip and wrote the following letter to his brother:

_Lovino,_

_I hope you understand that I have not had a true rest in over 2,000 years. This past conflict and my failure at this conference to resolve anything whatsoever that had been asked of me to resolve has told me that it is time for me to do that, now that nothing else could possibly go more wrong than it already has. I will not spend state money while I remain here for as long as I see fit; I have amassed my own personal fortune selling my art and that is all that I will use. Unlike the distance between Rome and New York, the distance between Paris and Rome is very easily surmountable, so should this be an issue for any party all you would need to do is come find me._

_Most importantly of all, you mustn't worry about me. If it were not now, it would be next month. Until further notice, I need to do something I know I’m actually good at._

_Feliciano_


	16. Conception

_Thousands of years prior to the Great War stood two children, a boy and a girl, in the courtyard of a palace long since razed to the ground. They were young enough that the oppressive desert heat was insufficient to suppress their energy. After playing so much ball with each other, the soles of their feet had long since been scalded into numbness._

_“When you become my wife,” the little boy said, green eyes luminous through their coating of khol, “I’ll go to the ends of the oceans and find whatever beautiful things there are to bring back to you. We’ll be rich like no one has known rich before, and we’d never be hungry.”_

_The little girl tilted back her chin. Her braids spilled down her back like water out of a shattered vase._

_“What do you mean, ‘when’?”_

_He smiled at her, showcasing a missing front tooth._

_“You’re a princess and I’m a prince. Haven’t you heard Ame and uncle Hannô talking about it? We’re going to be married when we come of age.”_

_She stuck out her tongue at him before turning her back on their game, walking back towards the palace._

_“I think I’ll find my own treasures, Ahumm, but thank you for the offer.”_

~~

_Salvatore was crouched three hundred meters away from where his sister’s coffin had been buried, his bulky frame in its black suit making for a perfect addition to the cemetery’s scenery. He had managed to stop crying when Lovino had rounded the corner, and it had started anew the moment he had made eye contact with him._

_Lovino sat next to him, back resting easily against one of the tombstones. His eyes were fixed on the cemetery gate. His voice was quiet and even, gentle in a way Salvatore had never heard it used before._

_“When Nina was in the earlier months of her pregnancy, she’d have trouble sleeping. It was right when the baby’d started to quicken, and I think the movement scared her somewhat. I went downstairs in the dead of night and she had three lamps lit. She was sitting in her nightgown on top of the dining table and there was scraps of paper everywhere, all of them full of equations and diagrams that I couldn’t make much sense of. She didn’t notice me until I asked her what she was doing,”_

_Salvatore thought back to the endless scribbles stuffed under his sister’s mattress, and the equally endless hours she’d spent trying to explain them to him. Each time this had happened he had tried to make himself as busy as possible to avoid it. He’d been a child then, and far less sentimental. Now that her notes had been deeded to him, he had resolved to rectify that as quickly as possible._

_“She said ‘You don’t see it, Lovino?’ and I said I didn’t, because at that hour I was too tired to pretend like I was smarter than her.”_

_Salvatore’s mouth split into a smile. The salt from his tears seeped into the corners of his lips._

_“She looked at me like I had just said I couldn’t see the sun. She got off the table, came walking toward me, and she kept waving one of those fucking proofs she’d drawn in my face like it would change something, and she said something like ‘who the hell taught you how to read?’ and I said ‘you did’.”_

_Salvatore began to laugh, his lungs switching rapidly between coughing and wheezing. By the time he’d collected himself, his face was clear of tearstains._

_“Come on, Sasà. We need to get back to her.”_

~~

Salvatore leaned on the entrance of a London hospital where Spiro had been admitted. There had not been the kind of physical therapy in Cyprus that Spiro would have needed to regain mobility in his shoulders and legs. Salvatore checked his watch. Spiro’s session was going to end in an hour.

_“I don’t have time to take care of him, and it would be better if you were to do so than I,” Arthur had said, glancing at the clock._

_“He was in a POW camp all that time and nobody thought to mention it to you?”_

_“It would seem so.”_

_“I don’t believe that.”_

_“Nobody is asking you to_ believe _anything_ , _Malta. They’re asking you to do what you’re told.”_

Salvatore found himself wishing that he’d brought Pepe with him to London, since he wasn’t just company but also a welcome distraction.

“Sasà?”

Salvatore’s eyes shot up from his watch to meet with Andria’s face. His older cousin shifted on his feet, putting his hands in his pockets.

“Come, walk with me. You aren’t going anywhere, are you?”

Salvatore hesitated. _It can’t take longer than an hour to speak to Corsica, can it?_

“No.”

Salvatore followed behind Andria in a way that would have shocked his superiors.

“What exactly are you doing here?”

Andria smiled pleasantly before reaching into his coat pocket for a packet of cigarettes. He motioned towards Salvatore with it, waiting for Salvatore to take one before taking one of his own.

“Arthur and I were close back when we were on the ocean more. Sometimes I come up here to reminisce if Francis isn’t looking too closely at me. I’m surprised you haven’t noticed, what with how much I used to drop in here when you were smaller.”

“I apologize, I was rather preoccupied back then. I spent a good deal of my time here trying to figure out how I could get back to Valletta as quickly as possible.”

“What changed?”

“Well, I got a leg injury first, and then I got older and fatter after that.” Salvatore remembered the day he had grown taller and wider than Arthur. He was still shorter than Andria (as most were), but their broad shoulders and chests were an easy match for each other. Based on how much Salvatore could feel himself bounce as he kept up with his cousin’s pace, he imagined his own girth was more a result of having eaten too many _imqaret_ rather than any sort of hard labor.

“Are you keeping up with your language?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Francis kept me in Paris for a very long time when he first acquired me; I spoke so much French that I almost forgot all of my Corsican. I ask because you’re speaking English a little too well. Are you still speaking _your_ language?”

“Yes.”

The look in Andria’s eye was making Salvatore somewhat uneasy.

“The worst day of my life was when I came home and when an old woman spoke to me in my own language…..I couldn’t say anything back.”

Salvatore didn’t dare mention how he could never keep up when his living family spoke in the otherwise long-extinct language of Punic.

“Arthur is my friend, but I befriended him back then because I knew that I didn’t want him as an enemy,” Andria continued, eye fixed on the sidewalk in front of him. “You need to keep sharp, or he’ll drain you dry before you even notice.”

Andria nudged his cousin on the shoulder.

“Your little _friend_ will know plenty about keeping his sense of self sharp under Arthur.”

Salvatore shook his head.

“It’s not like that at all. Spiro and I have just been through a lot together for a long time. We had no choice but to become friends.”

Andria took a drag from his cigarette and said nothing.

“How did you know about that?”

“He was stationed in the same military hospital room as I was. We’d call nurses for each other if one of us stopped breathing.”

Salvatore looked off to the side.

“Even if I did think of him that way, I still have a vow of celibacy to uphold.”

Andria blew air through the small gap in his two front teeth.

“Ain’t that long fulfilled? You joined the Order ages ago.”

“I promised fidelity in my oath for thirteen lifetimes, for Jesus and the twelve apostles. Eighty years per lifetime times thirteen is one thousand and forty years, so I still have some time.”

“A religion that doesn’t let you love is a bad one.”

“You converted to Catholicism too, though.”

“Yeah, and I regret it every day.”

“Do you even like men?”

Andria’s good eye darted to make eye contact with Salvatore.

“Do _you_?”

Salvatore’s bottom lip pressed itself quickly to his top lip.

“I might have been more open to it if my introduction to being loved by a man had been _kinder,_ ” Andria mused. “But no, I don’t. But there’s nothing wrong with it, Sasà. None of us will think less of you if you do.”

Salvatore said nothing, finally deciding to light the cigarette that had been between his fingers since the beginning of their encounter.

“Anyway, this eyepatch is itchy, so I think I’m going to go back to my hotel room and take it off. You’ll let me know if there’s anything you might need, right?”

“Of course, Andria.”

“ _Jesus,_ you’re sounding more posh by the minute.”

~~

Andria had taken to fitful dreams since he had returned to his home, ones that his dog was usually delegated to wake him from.

This was not one of those dreams.

Occasionally, there are dreams where you close your eyes in one world and it feels you immediately awaken in the next.

Andria’s eyes opened to be filled with those of his mother’s.

 _Ahumm,_ her thin face turned to the columns that had risen around them. _We have to speak with you. Follow me._

Andria had no choice other than to follow her.

He found himself in a well lit room overlooking the ocean. Based on the way the sunlight cast itself on the wall hangings and how the smell of salt in the air had permeated the stone itself, he knew where he was.

“Where’s Uncle?”

“He’ll be arriving shortly,” his mother replied, brushing the black hair out of her son’s face. “There’s someone here that I would like for you to meet.”

Andria realized that both of his eyes could function when he noticed the shadow in his periphery. A tall man with a thick head of dark, curly hair came forward.

Andria recognized the thin mouth and the curve of his large nose. Most of all, he recognized his eyes. Sea green.

“ _Ba_?”

The man nodded. Phoenicia turned her head and walked out of the room, most likely to give the two men some time to speak in private.

“It’s good to truly meet you, _Ahumm._ ”

The sound of Andria’s Phoenician name traveled through his brain and rested pleasantly between his ribs. If he could bottle his mother tongue, he would have worn it as cologne.

His father’s thin mouth turned up into a crooked grin, a smile so much like Antine’s that it made Andria’s chest ache.

“You look everything like your mother.”

Andria grinned back at him.

“She looked better than I ever will.”

“ _Good answer_ ,” his mother called over her shoulder.

“Have you met your other son yet?”

“Son? You mean your twin sister?”

“He’s been a man for a long time now,” Andria said evenly, his attachment to his brother ready to override any connection he might form with the man in front of him. His father shrugged.

“No, I haven’t. We wanted to call you in first; there’s not much time and there’s something that we need you to do.”

“Anything.”

“Your cousin’s trapped in limbo; she died before she was supposed to. She can’t be accepted here in the afterlife until her tenure towards her landmass is properly severed.”

“Do you want me to sever the tie somehow?”

“No. We want you to fortify it and pull her back to the world of the living. Whoever took her place hasn’t taken on her duties as well as they should have. The tether isn’t deteriorating or regenerating fast enough. You’re the only one of all of your mother’s children to inherit any sort of gift for that type of thing.”

Andria thought about the story Adão told him where he swore he somehow made rain fall in Brazil when his spyglass broke, and the way Arthur told him that if Antonio got angry enough with someone he could make the whole world develop neck pains. Maybe he hadn’t been the only one to inherit his mother’s sorcery, but he had been the only one taught to properly harness it.

“Necromancy is a tall order. I’m out of practice, but I’ll do my best.”

Andria glanced out at the horizon. It was a dusk that he’d missed seeing for many years.

“She had a newborn son. Is he there in limbo with her?”

Andria’s father shook his head.

“That child hadn’t made any claim to the land quite yet when he was born. His soul arrived here before his body turned to dust where you are. He let out his first cry in your uncle’s waiting arms.”

“How does uncle Hannô feel about raising his killer’s grandson?”

“Any of Hannô’s potential resentment towards a child that’s a quarter Roman is overridden by the fact that he is also one quarter of his own flesh, and what remains of him is made of the two women he loved most in the world. That baby is loved the same way you all were.”

The ground shook slightly.

“There’s not much time left before you have to go back. Do what you can, my boy. Anything at all will be enough.”

Andria saw his mother and uncle cross into the room. Andria felt a wave of relief over how well attached Hannô’s head was to his body, a vast difference from the last time he’d seen him. Andria couldn’t remember the last time he had seen his uncle look so relaxed.

“It’s time to go,” his mother said. “Anything else you need to say?”

Andria’s father shook his head.

“We’ll meet again.”

“ _Ame?_ ”

Phoenicia turned her head.

“We miss you a lot.”

She walked towards Andria.

“I miss you boys too.”

The fact that Andria was now too tall for her to kiss his forehead without him having to bend down meant that he woke up weeping.

~~

_Feliciano had approached his brother after the wake. He was quiet enough to give off the impression of respect for Lovino’s space._

_“Lovino, people are starting to leave.”_

_Lovino turned to look at him, eyes dryer than Feliciano had ever seen them. He had not cried once during the service or the procession; his face had only faltered at the very end of the walk through the graveyard, when he had signaled for someone to take Salvatore’s place as a pallbearer. Salvatore had been weeping too much to see where he was going._

_“Feli, do you know what they put in the coffins?”_

_“What do you mean?”_

_“She turned to ash, our son as well. That urn would have weighed nothing inside the coffin on its own.”_

~~

When Andria had called his twin brother’s apartment’s telephone, Antine had been occupied with replacing his positive qualities with gin.

“’Lo, who am I speakin’ to?”

“Damn, you’re not trying to drown yourself again, are you?”

“Not quite,” Antine sighed. Some part of him found himself wondering if Andria was going to be the only person to ever call him with anything resembling good news.

“Listen, I’ve been thinking about this pretty heavily. I’ve had an idea, and I’ve planned it out so that it’s foolproof.”

“Are you gonna try to invade continental Europe a third time before Ivan beats your ass concave?”

“Fuck you.”

“Are you going to eat gunpowder and swallow a lit match in Versailles again?”

“Let me be stupid in peace.”

“Andria, you maintained a correspondence with Jean-Jacques Rousseau for six years. That shit won’t work on me.”

“ _Fine_.”

“Okay, I’ll bite. You win. What’s your plan?”

“We should use the spell you used to heal me to bring Serafina back.”

The buzz of silence on Antine’s end was quickly severed by the soggy bark of Antine’s laughter.

“Weren’t you just saying to me that we should let her go, and let her stay dead? That it’s been long enough for us to move on?”

“Let’s just say that I changed my mind.”

“You don’t get to play mysterious with me when you want me to play necromancer a second time.”

“I saw dad, _Ahirom._ ”

Now Antine was ready to try drowning again.

“You what?”

“I saw our dad. Mom was there too, and same with uncle Hannô.”

Antine’s telephone was not high quality enough to pick up the way Andria’s voice was shaking, but the interference suggested to him that his hands were.

“What was he like, Andria?”

“Everything like you.”

Antine found himself thinking of all of the different ways that Rome had implied that their mother was a liar.

“What killed him?”

“He told me that he drowned, like mom said. He dove into the deep water right after we were born and never came back up,” Andria lied. He resolved to ask his father more the next time he saw him. “Low of Rome to say she murdered him, eh?”

“I think our own childhoods could speak for the fact that Rome was not nearly as good of a man as he’s remembered to be.”

“Talking awful loud in his capital, aren’t you?”

“Lovino has gone up to the newly formed Czechoslovakia to help Czechia deliver her little one. I’m ruling the roost until he returns, which means I can say whatever the hell I want about that clean-shaven bastard.”

Andria looked down at the scars on his ankles and wrists.

“He was not as bad as Genoa was.”

“Genoa was cruel in ways that hadn’t been invented in Rome’s time. If Rome knew what Genoa had known about all of the ways you could break a person down, I think he would have made Genoa gasp like a little girl.”

Andria hummed in a way that let Antine know that he agreed, but that the subject was making him uncomfortable.

“Anyway, I can’t leave until Lovino gets back.”

“What about Feliciano? Can’t he handle things until you return?”

Andria could hear Antine shift in his chair, which let him know that Antine was about to tell him some kind of gossip.

“You didn’t hear? He went to Paris to find himself. Start his art career, have sex with all five of the young and beautiful Frenchmen that are still alive. Cited the fact that Lovino had gone to New York for decades and said that it was his turn to vanish.”

“Lovino left when Serafina and their child died.”

“He’s mourning the death of his reputation.”

An image of Simone’s hand limply curled around the handgun that had ended his life briefly crossed Antine’s mind. He did not pay it that much thought; Feliciano, in Antine’s opinion, deserved more cruelty than Lovino ever did for his melodrama. Antine figured it was because Lovino’s angst had been the cause of vastly fewer casualties.

“Well, when he comes back, do you think it’s worth a shot? Will you come meet me wherever I am?”

Andria closed his eyes and listened to Antine’s defeated sigh.

“Life here is already a shambles. We might as well try to commit another sacrilege.”

“I couldn’t agree more. So I can count on you?”

“You can count on me, as always.”

“Okay. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye.”

Andria hung up his phone and looked over at his dog, whose tail was beating out a march on the floor.

“Want to go for a walk, lady?”

He flicked open his pocket-watch and took a note of how much daylight there would be left by the time he got home. The engraving on the inside curled over the photo of his mastiff, a replication of his late wife’s handwriting:

_Finu a morte caperemu._

Until death we live. The same adage had been engraved on the inside of their wedding bands.

He thought back to Salvatore. _I should call him as well, shouldn’t I?_

~~

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> FINALLY, part 3. This will be more sporadically updated since I actually have a JOB but next update should clear up Some Questions.


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